The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[domino harvey]

Can't believe the latest Christopher Nolan film went straight to YouTube

[colinr0380]

Either that or the latest minimalist Brandon Cronenberg film (or maximalist Samuel Beckett play, due to having a prop hat).

It has been a while since last seeing Gattaca but I remember finding that the dream of the main character (to belong and be one of the beautiful people) felt rather hollow and that was perhaps the point, to critique aspiring to the vapidly dominant and increasingly homogenous lifestyle as much as the lifestyle itself. I remember finding that ending of the Jude Law character in Gattaca impactful, as eventually he has to fully commit to swapping identities even if it means willing self destruction, whilst our 'hero' gets to jet off to hopefully a better future, and a new start, in the stars under an assumed identity. Niccol's later film In Time did this to an even more pointedly satirical extent, where we start off in a world that has already experienced a monstrous shift and then watch people trying to survive and aspire to social mobility within it.

[Rayon Vert]

One per decade this week.

Screamers (Duguay 1995). (1st viewing) This was on an underrated or neglected sci-fi internet film list or two. A planet used for mining (what else is new?) is now a barren post-apocalyptic habitat with small armies left after the war that occurred between the mining company and a strikers’ alliance. The screamers are these self-replicating A.I. machines that are supposed to kill members of the mining company. This is a Philip K. Dick adaptation (the short story Second Variety) and apparently one of the most faithful ones. It’s definitely a recognizable universe with the human-impersonating androids we eventually run into, machines getting the upper hand, and even a teddy bear that features. Unfortunately whatever was good in the story or script doesn’t translate onto the screen for the most part. This looked and felt extremely generic, and the actors, sets and direction were all pretty weak and nondescript. So there are reasons it’s overlooked.


The Final Countdown (Taylor 1980). (1st viewing) This was definitely more fun. For those who may not know, this is Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen starring in a story about a navy aircraft carrier departing Pearl Harbor that confronts a storm that turns out to be a portal through time to December 7, 1941, hours before the attacks begin. It’s the premise that’s the most entertaining thing, watching how the crew progressively find out what’s going on, and then having to confront decisions like: do we intervene and potentially change history? And if we strike before Japan does, then Japan hasn’t actually attacked the United States. It’s not great by any means, but it’s entertaining enough, even if the backend isn’t as strong and the film is pretty nakedly a commercial for the U.S. Navy’s new nuclear supercarrier.


Piranha (Dante 1978). (1st viewing) Genetically altered fish, hence the sci-fi suitability. It was obvious the film was spoofing Jaws by recreating similar set pieces, but it’s a bit to stretch to label this a comedy, as that’s not the tone through most of it. In any event, there wasn’t much to like here and I thought this was pretty tedious.


Apollo 18 (López-Gallego 2011). (1st viewing) Found footage reveals that after being cancelled Apollo 18 was actually secretly launched in 1974 as a department of defense mission to install on the moon a Soviet missile early warning system. Upon landing, the three astronauts start encountering unusual phenomena: strange noises, rocks seemingly moving and mysteriously appearing inside the lunar module, unearthly footsteps, a dead Russian cosmonaut… you know where this is going. Cool premise, and there are some anguishing, suspenseful moments near the end that work, but overall this small-budget Alien-ish horror trip doesn’t really deliver the goods like it should. It doesn’t really succeed in creating the sense of terror it aims for, and in general it ends up feeling a little undercooked and unsatisfyingly scripted. Neat idea about the moon rocks though.


Sunshine (Boyle 2007). (1st viewing) Decisions, decisions… I might have been a bit more impressed if during this project I hadn’t seen several films made later that executed this sort of scenario better. I can’t say it’s a bad film and in terms of nerve-racking twists and action it definitely has its moments. On the other hand, it does take a really wacky turn at the end with all of that Pinbacker business, and overall just the bombast of Boyle’s style (visually and aurally) hurts the realism and was a pretty big turn-off for me. Also, I’m generally forgiving for dumb story/plot points, but the idea of humanity putting all of its hopes in this tricky mission with a crew of only eight people (on such a huge ship) was kind of hard to swallow - but of course all of the suspense in the film depends on that factor being present, so there you go. I was kind of wishing at some point we’d also find out why the sun is dying in the first place!


The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Guest 1961). (1st viewing) Strong similarities to the problems and conceived solutions that feature in Sunshine. Simultaneous nuclear test bombing by the US and the Soviets at the poles have changed the earth’s axis, and possibly done worse damage… I love the way the crisis here is fleshed out in a specific, detailed human environment in London, where a lot of time is given to the establishing of that context, resulting in the personal dramatic storylines possessing depth and interest on their own. The characters eventually figure out what is happening through strange changes, like extreme climate phenomena. Watching the consequences, it’s hard not to be struck (and depressed) about how relevant this is and will be to our climate crisis (like water shortage leading to the end of private use of water and the creation of “communal washing centers”). A powerful statement about the arms race of the period as well. I was expecting it based on its reputation but yes it’s definitely a very good film, and another winner for Val Guest. The 4K restoration is available both on BFI and Kino, so: buy it, watch it, list it.


On the Beach (Kramer 1959). (1st viewing) I know Kramer mostly by (bad) reputation so I was going into this with low expectations. I definitely didn’t find it awful. There are some good scenes, especially the middle ones involving the submarine’s adventures down the West Coast where the film actually threatened to become good, and you’ve got to give the whole endeavor credit for being uncompromising in its ending, even if the execution is heavy-handed. However the whole film has a strange, messy structure. And Gardner plays that sort of needy character that she’s done elsewhere but here there’s not much to like about her (that neediness is all she is, as she herself explicitly states), and the chemistry with Peck is really flat. Then there are some jarring scenes early on of characters enjoying themselves that are really at odds with the situation, which is made especially problematic by the underlining score at those points which seems to exist in complete denial that human civilization has been wiped out and that there’s only months left for these final survivors. Watching this, I thought back to 2013’s These Final Hours, which I wrote-up earlier, since it’s also about Australians waiting for death to catch up to them after it’s exterminated the rest of the world (in that case after an asteroid has hit). There’s such a contrast between the depiction of a post-apocalypse society that keeps all of its rituals and manners as if nothing is happening, and one that descends into equally exaggerated complete chaos and mayhem.

[knives]

I know Domino disagrees, but I think On the Beach is one of the better Kramer’s even coming close to being good.

[domino harvey]

I think it's a strong second place finisher to Ship of Fools as Kramer's worst, yes. Here are my thoughts from elsewhere

Now let's talk about the real feather in Kramer's cap, On the Beach (1959), as horrendously mistaken a film as I can fathom. This is the movie that "saved the world," if you'll recall, by showing us how beautiful life is (via killing everyone in the world). Only Kramer's myopic "Hollywood" liberalism could inform this vision of post-apocalyptic society waiting around to die from radioactive fallout as polite bordering on utopic. The lack of basic insight into human nature ("Of course people will do what's best for each other because we're all wonderful little snowflakes") makes all the truly sick posteuring even more abrasive-- I can envision a sequence like Anthony Perkins telling his beautiful young wife how she'll soon have to kill their infant child to spare it the pain of radiation sickness being powerful, haunting, and other positive emotions. But here it only comes off as what it is: cheap hands-off provocation, lacking in any true dramatic function or purpose other than to serve as morose shoulder-shoving.

A game defense, Colin, but On the Beach is really the Kramer film that moves me into offense mode. Here's a film that wants nothing more than to convince the viewer that life must be salvaged by the living, but it does so by presenting famous and pretty people carrying on like they normally would in any film, really, and then killing them (even if most are offed by default). The end. It's a bizarre methodology that backfires because the thesis is at its very core offensive: the beauty of life can only be revealed by removing it? Take what for me is one of the most obscene sequences in all of cinema: Anthony Perkins and Donna Anderson as the young parents, wallowing in their efficiency apartment as a family, preparing to commit suicide. The suicidal act itself isn't abominable, but its signifiers are: here are two "characters" whose only purpose in this film has been to be attractive, like flowers in bloom they are the promise of tomorrow and the beauties of today, and Kramer's only default response is to crush them slowly under his heel. That's their sole narrative function: to be snuffed out. It's symptomatic of the simplistic thinking the film operates on, the binary reductiveness that would provoke the very sort of nuclear disaster he's warning us against! So, I guess if I were Derrida, I'd love it.

[Michael Kerpan]

As to On the Beach -- I hated the book so much I never even considered watching the movie.

[Rayon Vert]

I think Domino your opinion mostly hinges on what I myself found so jarring and f'd up, but I can see knives' point at least for the middle chunk of the film which is the submarine trip to California, just taken as a straight nuclear world sci-fi episode in itself which leaves behind all of the off-putting faux psychological existential business. But the weight ends up dipping on domino's end of the scale I have to say.

[therewillbeblus]

Sunshine (Boyle 2007). (1st viewing) Decisions, decisions… I might have been a bit more impressed if during this project I hadn’t seen several films made later that executed this sort of scenario better. I can’t say it’s a bad film and in terms of nerve-racking twists and action it definitely has its moments. On the other hand, it does take a really wacky turn at the end with all of that Pinbacker business, and overall just the bombast of Boyle’s style (visually and aurally) hurts the realism and was a pretty big turn-off for me. Also, I’m generally forgiving for dumb story/plot points, but the idea of humanity putting all of its hopes in this tricky mission with a crew of only eight people (on such a huge ship) was kind of hard to swallow - but of course all of the suspense in the film depends on that factor being present, so there you go. I was kind of wishing at some point we’d also find out why the sun is dying in the first place!

I find Sunshine similarly frustrating because of what I interpret to be a failure to make strategic narrative decisions to serve its themes. This could have been a rare example of the kind of film that’s uneven by design yet uses that jarring effect to reflect its apocalyptic ideas in atmospheric tone, but instead it translates as a chaotic evolution into several half-baked ideas. Part of the problem is in devolving the overwhelming enigmatic threat of a corporeal mission to contest with a star into a physical threat in human form, which seems like the opposite direction the film should go in. Normally I find it interesting when films take an intangible adversary and manifest an accessible version of it as allegory, but I don’t think that this is what’s happening here, since the turn doesn’t shift attention from that mission enough to substitute it for metaphorical intent. Even if it did, it wouldn’t follows in step with the quicksand-esque helplessness of existential impotence its scope is transmitting in making us feel smaller, weaker, and increasingly less important over time. I still find myself enjoying bits of the slasher final act, but not as part of a comprehensive whole.

[Rayon Vert]

btw, when I wrote "Decisions, decisions..." (which I didn't expect to be well-understood unless someone has just seen the movie or remembers it very well), I wasn't referring to my difficulty in weighing this movie, but I meant it as an ironic wink at how the whole movie is structured by this series of hugely important life-and-death-for-humanity toss-a-coin mission decisions, which is par for the course for this type of space journey film but almost becomes funny because of just how unrelenting here this trope is.

[colinr0380]

On The Beach does have the audacity of casting Fred Astaire as a racing driver, so we get the ultimate perversity of never even seeing him having to walk around in his big action scenes, let alone dance! I think a lot of the more frustrating and abrasive aspects of the film are intentional though, especially that drunken, never ending half-screamed chorus of Waltzing Matilda that occurs underneath the big romantic scene between Gregory Peck and Ava Gardener as if to undermine and underline once and for all the way that all the people in Australia have just been given a brief reprieve from the oncoming wave of inevitable death that has already occurred in the rest of the world, and are performing shadows of actions that are utterly meaningless in a society with no future left to build upon.

(In other words its probably not the cheeriest film to watch even when a pandemic is not going on!)

There is also the 2000 TV movie version of the story (by Russell Mulcahy of Highlander fame starring Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward. But of more interest in featuring the late Australian character actors Bill Hunter and Bud Tingwell) which pretty much follows the events of the film, though I seem to recall it downplays the subplot of the young couple a bit (though weirdly that section in this version now all plays like a nuclear war themed, depressive episode of Neighbours instead!) and the general romance angle. It is also far less memorable than the 1959 film both because of the overbearing Christopher Young score and simply without having the selling point of an incredible, bizarrely incongruous all star cast getting mashed together with deafeningly, deadeningly blunt and obvious social commentary messages which might have played better if left as subtext of the Kramer film (which is pretty much what makes every Stanley Kramer film bizarre, but On The Beach the most of all!)

[Dr Amicus]

The past few days I've done a Resident Evil series watch (rewatch for the first two) - at least of the Paul WS Anderson series. Note - he wrote all of these, including the two he didn't direct. I've only played a but of the first two games so won't be making much of the overlap (hint for ColinR...)

Resident Evil (2002, Anderson) - A reasonable start to the series, I'd remembered only the laser-beam kill corridor and the train from seeing this at the cinema. This starts of an SF thriller, based mostly in the underground base of the evil company (lazily called the Umbrella Corporation) as Colin Salmon's security team enter, encounter an amnesiac Milla Jovovich, and cope with various security devices / traps. And then a whole lot of zombies get loose and it turns into a Romero film (apparently he was an early contender for director). Quite fun, like the rest of series it's commendably a female led action film (Michelle Rodriguez going full Vazquez is the co=lead here) if not immune to having Jovovich near naked / in skimpy outfits for some time, and is a solid enough start to the franchise. Ropey CGI though.

RE: Apocalypse (2004, Alexander Witt) - leaving the confines of the underground base and into Raccoon City and the result is a straightforward Zombie film with some slightly less ropey CGI mutants. Sienna Guillory, as game lead Jill Valentine, looks like a CGI character more than a real person (her costume shrieks videogame) but the film benefits strongly from Jared Harris's helpful scientist monitoring our heroes from outside the city. A step down from the first film, but watchable enough.

RE: Extinction (2007, Russell Mulcahy) - the highpoint of the series, zombies meet Mad Max 2. Jovovich now has genetically engineered super powers and encounters Ali Larter's group of survivor's in a post-apocyptic Western. Iain Glen as the villain carrying out Day-Of-The-Dead experiments on the undead is clearly having a blast and this is a quality 90 mins of exploitation trash.

RE: Afterlife (2010, Anderson) - A real step down. After an amusing action sequence as Jovovich infiltrates (another) Umbrella Corp base, this settles down into a fairly rote Dawn of the Dead rehash until the ending relocates our surviving heroes to a new location which is the setting off point for...

RE: Retribution (2012, Anderson). A decent opening credit sequence played in reverse is the highpoint here of probably the least interesting of the series which turns out to be a 90 min shooting match in another underground base. The return of previous series characters is a nice touch, but this is a lot less interesting than it really should be (the base has a variety of different areas which are reconstructions of real locales for "testing purposes") even through it is probably the most obviously SF in the series so far. Also, the revelations in the next film mean this makes very little sense in retrospect.

RE: The Final Chapter (2016, Anderson). Much better and more fun. Jovovich is fully clothed the entire film (which shouldn't be notable, but sadly it is - the series shows a rather puerile habit for getting her clothes off) and is now definitely in Mad Max mode. The undead, although present (en masse), are less of a threat than (decent quality) CGI monsters and the human villains from Umbrella. The first half in the blasted landscape / city is the better, but the second half as our heroes redo film one in going back into the base from that film is still quite fun. There is a countdown before THE END OF THE WORLD that seems fairly arbitrary - but it gives the film some momentum. Plenty of evil corporation shenanigans (including, surely, a nod to Robocop) who seem to have got their EVIL PLAN from an old Doctor Who episode. None of these films are particularly great, but I'd happily rewatch this or Extinction even if they're going nowhere near my final list.

[Mr Sausage]

Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Robocop is the greatest 80s action movie. Not that it's my favourite, necessarily, or the best. But it's the greatest because it takes the entire ethos of the action film as an 80s phenomenon, epitomizes it, and in the extremity of that epitomization becomes a critique. No action movie is quite so '80s', and none so knowing.

Robocop himself is the movie's best critique. He is the ultimate 80s action hero: a paragon of justice and righteousness, obeying ironclad virtues and dedicated to cleaning up an out of control world. He is horrendously, thoughtlessly violent, incapable of negotiation, approaching all situations as opportunities to crush and destroy. Despite his extreme violence, he is also utterly sanitized: incapable of sex, drinking, or foul language--a fit playmate and role model for schoolyard children, a darling of daytime feel-good news. He can save people from violence, and yet is incapable of concern, empathy, or any regard for their emotions: see his hilarious response to the tearful thanks of the would-be rape victim he saves. He stands up for truth and justice, but only as pure abstractions; he has no connection to actual people. He acts for the good, but has no particular idea why he does it. And he is thoroughly, utterly corporate.

An 80s action hero is usually content to be only a few of these things, usually in diluted forms. Robocop combines all of them into an essence. He reveals the very ethos of the action movie hero. Here's my favourite example of how the movie puts Robocop in a bog standard, unironic hero situation, but lets the overall context turn that moment into genuine satire. There's that moment where Robocop chokes Clarence Boddiker nearly to death before thinking better of it and doing the right thing. We've all seen such a moment in many other action movies. Ordinarily, such a scene would satisfy the emotional righteousness of the hero's anger while showing him to be an exemplar of virtue, even in extremis (while often enough rewarding the hero by having the bad guy give him a sudden reason to make the killing judicial). Robocop, tho', is not following any morality or ethics, but blindly obeying directives, ones designed by a corporate system ostensibly to protect criminals from having their rights violated, but in practise just protects them from justice since criminals are useful and lucrative in corporate America. The hero's virtue moment is actually a moment of inhumanity serving only to reinforce the superficial values of a system that is not virtuous and has no interest in being so. Robocop's higher values cannot transcend the system they serve. In the Dirty Harry model, truth and justice are values that transcend the limitations of whatever specific political and justice systems that hold them in check. Robocop understands that these values always serve the interests of someone and no amount of purity can rescue them from the corruption of a system that takes them as virtues. Whatever local justice Robocop achieves just reinforces the larger injustices of the system.

The corporate system in the movie is so corrupting, it even makes villains of the police. The police officers are given a sympathetic depiction in the beginning of the movie, a beleaguered and desperate group of people barely surviving day to day. You appreciate the human level of their frustration and despair. They are the most humanized group in the film. By the end of the film, they are a hostile, faceless, black-clad force shooting away at the unarmed and helpless hero in a pathetic scene. There are some objectors, but they are powerless to stop the comically one-sided attempt at slaughter. Because of whose interests they serve, all the humanizing and sympathy in the world cannot save the police from being the agents of evil, executing an unarmed man at the behest of the villain. They are hardly better than ED209. Who would've thought.

When people praise the satire of the movie, they tend to focus on contextual elements like the tv commercials and corporate boardroom scenes, the coke parties and comic book violence. Far less do they mention what the context is actually doing beyond making easy jokes at the expense of the Reagen era. For me the movie succeeds as a satire not because of its jokes, but because the context turns every straightforward or sincere presentation of Robocop as a hero into a critique of the values that constitute the idea of movie heroism. It even manages, in a fun irony, to turn vigilante justice into genuine heroism. When Robocop takes justice into his own hands and kills Boddiker and his gang, we can cheer it on not because it's the right thing or the just thing or the socially responsible thing or whatever, because none of that is even possible in such a corrupt system. We can cheer it because, of all the options, it's at least the human one. A violent, sanitized, hypocritical, faceless corporate system is so grotesque it makes even violent revenge seem human. That's a fun but troubling irony (one Tarantino loves to play with). Death Wish, Dirty Harry, or Cobra would have us see vigilantism as a correction to a limp-wristed justice system, an attempt at righteous balance. Robocop makes it an expression of individuality in a dehumanizing system. We're close to revolutionary thinking, or at least, the thinking behind violent resistance.

There is a level on which Verhoeven's topic is really fascism. Robocop is a story of the fascist tool becoming self aware and, in a violent fit, attacking everything around him. But the movie is ironic rather than sincere, so we find Robocop only partially successful. His self awareness does not release him from his programming, and in order to defeat the villain, he still needs corporate permission. His effect is not systemic--the system is too wide for that and he is too compromised. Robocop's triumph is personal rather than systemic: however contingent, he reclaims a piece of humanity from the system that erased it. The ending is outwardly hopeful but inwardly despairing.

Robocop is the greatest 80s action movie. It's also a top notch sci fi film and I'm putting it high up on the list.

[colinr0380]

Great post Mr Sausage! And whilst I would fully agree I do also like the intentional paradox that "the future of law enforcement" is really a nostalgic harkening back to the good old days of gunslinging western sheriffs riding into the lawless town and setting things straight with their extremely rigid moral compass and impressive marksmanship whilst also as you say being almost entirely emotionless and sexless to an almost Gary Cooper extent (even with a wife and child who only exist as halcyon memories not actual beings anymore), treating both victim and criminal with the same brusque demeanour! Even that beautifully ambivalent, chilling response to injured colleagues: "They'll fix you.. they fix everything"

In that sense ED-209 is meant to be the ultimate 80s law enforcement fetish object with similarly rigid rules of engagement but a very hard edge that has all of the even slight flickers of human emotion removed for non-negotiable ultimatums based on its programming. Yet who is the one who ends up throwing a frustrated temper tantrum at the end just because they cannot get down the stairs?

That Americana nostalgia aspect of Murphy (that only exists in the mind: of Murphy himself and of his almost childishly enthusiastic creators) may be the only thing that truly centres and grounds him once he is transplanted into his cyborg suit, which gets investigated more fully in RoboCop 2 where the company is trying (and eventually succeeds) in sticking expendable villains into the shell instead but find that they mostly end up going crazy. Until they create the ultimate bad guy antagonist to face off against the sheriff.

[Murdoch]

I'm not sure I'll have time to do a full list since I'm coming to this late, but I do love doing write-ups for these projects! I'm hoping to at least revisit the original Planet of the Apes sequels, as I watched them in my teenage years and was surprised at how bleak they were.

Aniara (2018) - Not exactly a pleasant experience but I really admired the movie's consistent dreariness, taking whatever hope the characters find and promptly snuffing it out. It is perhaps the most realistic film about interstellar space travel ever made with a ship that drifts through empty, monotonous space with little incident or discovery. The slow disintegration of the ship's microcosm of civilization hammers you over the head with the inevitability of its collapse, and for me the biggest fault of the film is it takes two hours to get to a point it so clearly tells the viewer it's headed that those two hours feel like a real drag. Still, it's by far the most memorable sci-fi film I've seen in the 2010s for its stark portrayal of the horrific possibilities of space travel and I can't help but think Armando Ianucci saw this before he wrote the tedious Avenue 5. Recommended if you're looking for something to make you contemplate the inevitability of your death. Great for the whole family!

Save Yourselves! (2020) - I love John Paul Reynolds and have really enjoyed Sunita Mani on GLOW, so I was immediately interested in this when it popped up on Hulu (I'd probably watch the two of them read the phone book together and still find something to enjoy). This is a rather by-the-numbers couple retreats to the middle of nowhere only to discover the apocalypse hit while they weren't home. It's more fun for its millennial midlife couple crisis angst than anything to do with the space invaders that become the centerpiece of the movie halfway through. Reynolds and Mani have great chemistry and I wish this had ditched its sci-fi trappings and just stuck with a couple retreating to the great outdoors to get away from their lives. Plus the movie totally wastes High Maintenance's Ben Sinclair on the thankless role of the friend that leant the lead couple his cabin.

End of Evangelion (1997) - If I make a list, I'd be surprised if this doesn't wind up at the top spot. It was discussed earlier in the thread but I'll add my two cents. I'm a late arrival to Evangelion, having only discovered it when the new Netflix dub was released, but this film, as the culmination of the anime, hit me like a ton of bricks. If Neon Genesis Evangelion is about overcoming depression and self-doubt, EoE is about succumbing to it. The surreal, grotesque and strangely uplifting final moments create one of the most confounding and yet mesmerizing endings of any film, animated or live action. I'll admit that some of the finer plot points such as "the meaning of the AT field," as Asuka puts it, are lost on me, but that only makes me more eager to delve into Anno's mad vision of mechs and depression. Misato's monologue to Shinji outside the elevator never fails to make me tear up because of how personally I connect with what she's saying. The need to find closure in a pursuit that feels fruitless, the desire to push others away to protect one's self. There are so many layers to this film, and I think what I appreciate the most about it is Anno's refusal to give Shinji forgiveness, for he has done horrible things and his self-loathing is perhaps his greatest attribute to me - a character that can't forgive himself, so instead retreats into an endless cycle of depression. I can't think of any other film that captures the experience of depression in such a compelling fashion.

Memories (1995) - A portmanteau of three short anime films, none of which are connected in any way I could pick up on. The first, about a group of astronauts who inexplicably come across an asteroid that houses a forgotten opera singer's mansion and memories, was definitely the most in line with the title, and I really enjoyed the style of the art direction. However, I wasn't very drawn into its tale of lost love and grief, largely because it felt like it presented these themes in a superficial and cliched way - a woman who longed for her dead lover, a father for his lost child. The second segment was my favorite for how bizarre it was - a pharmaceutical worker swallows an experimental drug and accidentally unleashes a deadly virus that follows him as he travels through Japan. For such a grim (and relevant) plot, it strikes a very light, almost whimsical tone, as the central buffoon travels across the country on a motorbike, oblivious that he's the cause of the destruction he finds wherever he goes. The last is the most stylistically different and concerns a city teeming with various-sized cannons pointed outwards toward an unseen threat. The concept is quite Orwellian in nature, its aesthetic and dialogue leaning heavy into Soviet-esque propaganda. I found all three shorts intriguing enough and I'd recommend the film to anyone interested in anime from this era, although nothing here would break my top 50.

Doom (2006) - The combination of someone playing too much Doom and watching Aliens too many times. Still might be the best movie adaptation of a video game though, which really isn't saying much!

[colinr0380]

The best thing about the Doom film is that it has Rosamund Pike as the Mars base scientist getting to do her best 'Wilford Brimley in The Thing' impression, who at one point has to do tests on a creature that has been trapped inside a door! I do not particularly hate the Doom film (and it probably becomes the purest video game adaptation so far at the finale when our hero goes on the rampage and everything turns into a first person shooter perspective), but it still does not top the Silent Hill film for me.

[Murdoch]

Silent Hill I have my reservations about (and I'm likely straying from the topic at hand here given there's little sci-fi about it). I love the video game series but I don't think it's possible to translate the series' sense of unease to film, or at least not by way of a straight narrative adaptation. I could use a rewatch of it though as it's been about a decade since I last saw it.

Doom, on the other hand, captures the kind of dumb action movie vibe of the original game, and it's hard to think of a more fitting action film to crib from than Aliens. Plus, there's a decent drinking game to be made out of every time Rosamund Pike reacts to something gruesome or surprising by shrieking her lungs out.

[bottled spider]

Timecrimes (Vigalondo, 2007). The basic idea is that travelling a short time into the past effectively creates a copy of the time traveller, a copy competing with the original for the same identity. The hapless protagonist Hector gets lured into just such a time loop initiated by a physicist performing unauthorized experiments in his company's lab over the week end. How this loop began is an insoluble chicken/egg paradox, as far as I can tell. Another key element I didn't understand was a hurried explanation given by the physicist as to how the loop terminates of itself if Hector simply refrains from interfering. But interfere he does, because he, the "original" Hector, wants to ensure that he is the final Hector to emerge from the loop. Shenanigans ensue. I don't know if the logic hangs together, and it may not matter, because the movie is a fast paced, uncerebral comedy thriller. The logic is definitely irrelevant from my point of view because I detested the film regardless, for its gratuitous unsavoury sexual violence. I'm with the PC brigade on this one. Cancel Vigalondo!

Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (Jindřich Polák, 1977). A science fiction spoof about a plot to travel back in time and arm Hitler with an atomic bomb. If "spoof" doesn't sound enticing, it's a Czech spoof, inflected with that unique brand of irony, absurdity, and black humour peculiar to Czech cinema. After a promising and funny title sequence, the film seems to settle into a mild and slow farce, but then it picks up again, growing increasingly madcap as it goes. It's clever in its silliness, compounding, for example, time travel paradoxes with an identical twins comedy of errors. Recommended.

Cherry 2000 (Steve de Jarnatt, 1987). Script by Almereyda! Starring Melanie Griffiths. Features one superb action sequence. Witty script. Fun score. Some interesting imagery. Recommended.

[therewillbeblus]

I detested the film regardless, for its gratuitous unsavoury sexual violence. I'm with the PC brigade on this one. Cancel Vigalondo!

Before you do, I'd recommending checking out Colossal, where he not only makes a dual allegorical statement partly against coercive sexual aggression, but also dares to take the time to construct a three-dimensional character in a toxic male perpetrator and then strip him of all his layers to devolve him of any dignity and worth we thought he may have in a boldly anti-humanistic move. I have yet to see an example anywhere near the equivalent of this dedication of a filmmaker to convey the idea that some people may not deserve to be valued.

[bottled spider]

Yeah, I might watch Colossal, given that I liked Extraterreste and his shorts. Timecrimes in fact is a pretty good movie, other than the creep factor. I get that the sheer brazen over-the-top gratuitousness of that strip business is the joke, but I didn't like it.

[Murdoch]

I'm with you, bottled spider, on Timecrimes. While Vigslondo did demonstrate an earnest concern with the vicious nature of toxic masculinity in Colossal, Timecrimes shows such a disregard for its single female character

SpoilerShow

(at one point showing her naked corpse for seemingly no other reason than to include some gratuitous nudity)

that I have a hard time recommending it, even though I really enjoyed the way it dealt with time travel.

[Murdoch]

THX-1136 (1971) - It's remarkable how creative Lucas was as a filmmaker before Star Wars. To be honest, I'm only basing that opinion off of this, which was my first viewing, and American Graffiti, but I wonder what Lucas would have done had he never come up with his magnum opus franchise. This film drew me in more for its aesthetic than its story, which I'll admit I only half-paid attention to, but there's a lot to admire visually here. It won't make my list at the moment but maybe if I rewatch it in a few weeks I'll be in a better frame of mind to take in its dystopian plot.

Code 46 (2003) - The amount of world-building that Winterbottom packs into this ~90 minute film is a bit overwhelming, and I had to visit the Wiki page to get a better grasp on what exactly Robbins was investigating. Still, I really liked the way this film presents its classist system based upon genetics even if I think it needed a longer running time to flesh out its ideas. I think I enjoyed WInterbottom's vision of the future more than anything that happened between Robbins and Morton - the hybrid language, the reproductive limitations, the way the the habitation discrepancies between the film's haves and have-nots are slowly worked into the film. It's presently hovering around the bottom of my list as an admirable stab at the sci-fi genre by a humanist auteur with an abundance of ideas about how society would develop in the near future, even if the Ghost in the Shell-esque human enhancements are pretty hokey.

White Christmas (Black Mirror) - I can't stand a good amount of this show, finding its ruminations on the trappings of technology uninspired more often than not (One Million Merits is for me the show at its worst with its heavy-handed condemnation of stardom measured by popularity). This special, however, was the highlight of the series and made me glad I stuck with it. Like most of the series, it takes a fairly common practice in our lives on social media - in this case, the ability to block someone from contacting you - and extends it to a real world environment, essentially allowing one person to mute and blur out another person whom they dislike from the former's everyday existence. It's such a horrifying yet prescient idea and for me the only time the series actually met the "Twilight Zone for the Digital Age" descriptor that I'd seen thrown about so often. The backstory for Jon Hamm's character is rather uninteresting, but the ending packs a wallop. Definitely making my list as I think about it whenever I hear of a celebrity's meltdown on Twitter or Instagram.

[Rayon Vert]

The Arrival (Twohy 1996). (1st viewing) I’m guessing this is a familiar enough title to many or some but I don’t remember hearing of it. Strange how just a year before, this starts just like Contact: Charlie Sheen is working for SETI, gets a signal, then gets the rundown from his boss how the money isn’t there anymore for him. But then it goes off into completely different territory, with the conspiracy and the aliens. When you see them, a bit of silliness creeps in but somehow, surprisingly, that doesn’t take away from how absorbing this fun thriller is. The premise involving the greenhouse gases is kind of neat and the film doesn’t take itself too seriously, while not lapsing into comedy either. In a way, it ends up being a bit like Contact’s dark mirror. Not spectacular but quite entertaining in a solid B-film kind of way, and in terms of Twohy I’ll definitely take this over Pitch Black.


Timecrimes (Vigalondo 2007). (1st viewing)

Timecrimes is the filmmaker’s most traditional science-fiction movie, and one that deserves to be seen by anyone interested in the time-travel concept. It’s not amazing, but it’s entertaining and twisty in design- a more comprehensible Primer with a mystery-adventure narrative.

Very apt description. So I also happened to watch this too this week and I’d say it stands out from the other time travel/loop films in that from the start you can see the traces already existing of the time travel journeys to come. Yeah it’s not extraordinary (and I could guess from the start who the guy in the pink bandages was) but it was a fun and worthwhile puzzle to watch and put together. It definitely felt like a black comedy, though, which is an entirely different tone than the more properly horrific Primer.

Gratuitous nudity perhaps (although the sight of the nudity is part of what motivates Hector to go check what’s in the bushes), but “sexual violence” seems to be a bit strongly worded for the way those scenes came across to me (maybe the dark comic tone explains also my non-repelled reaction). On that end, what made less sense was how much that character was willing to put herself at risk in the way she does.


The Blob (Yeaworth 1958). (1st viewing) This played like the long-lost episode of Happy Days where they chase the escaped jell-o pudding. I’ll stick to X the Unknown (which I recommend for those who haven't seen it - it's on my list).


The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner 1980). (revisit) It’s entertaining enough but I ended up having a lot of the same misgivings than with my rewatch of the first film. I can’t see so much what the difference is that makes this one such a high-and-above popular choice among the fans. It definitely earns extra points for the still spectacular opening section on the ice planet, but loses some for the execution of Yoda: it’s still jarring to hear Frank Oz’s muppet voice come out of that thing (I swear I can hear Miss Piggy at one point).


Logan’s Run (Anderson 1976). (1st viewing) I knew going in that this rates especially high in terms of 70s kitsch and unintended camp, but despite that the story’s intriguing enough for a good while to make you at least curious to see where it goes, and York and Agutter’s performances are solid enough to help sustain a measure of interest. Events late in the narrative triggered disparate flashbacks to Walkabout and to the recent disorder in the U.S. Senate (!). When Ustinov shows up, though, his wry performance clashes inelegantly with the way the film - at this point way beyond silly - takes itself seriously, and from that point on the film exhausted any of its charm. The backend that follows is quite uninspired and tedious, so that in the end I couldn’t help but agree with the terrible reviews the film originally received.


Prometheus (Scott 2012). (1st viewing) For some reason I was under the impression that this was supposed to be a bit slow, stronger on the visuals than story, so it came as a surprise as to how much of a classic Aliens thriller it actually is. I was doubtful at first seeing how in the opening scenes this involved ancient astronauts but it didn’t take long to be on board with all of it - the mission, the characters, the atmosphere. Whatever the faults the film has - not the neatest story arc, characters that could have been more developed, the film borrowing from Alien 3 for one of its key plot twists -, none of them was significant for me or dented how entertaining and enjoyable it was. In the end, I thought it recaptured the nice mixture of space mystery adventure and all-out horror action that the first Alien film was. Maybe seeing this several times might diminish the impact, but right now the initial wow factor will allow it a mid-range ranking on my list.

[therewillbeblus]

Prometheus is not a great movie, but worth revisiting every so often for the C-section scene, which for my money is the single greatest moment in the series and the best thing that Scott has ever done

[bottled spider]

Gratuitous nudity perhaps (although the sight of the nudity is part of what motivates Hector to go check what’s in the bushes), but “sexual violence” seems to be a bit strongly worded for the way those scenes came across to me (maybe the dark comic tone explains also my non-repelled reaction). On that end, what made less sense was how much that character was willing to put herself at risk in the way she does.

SpoilerShow

Forcing someone to strip at knife is definitely sexual violence. That his intentions are "innocent" doesn't mitigate the terror inflicted on the victim. When she attempts to flee, he chases her, causing her to fall and get knocked out. Pretty violent from her point of view.

And in the end he murders her. The version of Hector who grabs her leg and pulls her to her death kills her purely by accident. But the version who manipulates this event is committing cold-blooded murder. This retroactively makes the earlier strip scene that much more repugnant. Blech. If only the film had been hijacked fifteen minute in by Almodóvar...

[Rayon Vert]

I guess the tone of it kept me from identifying with her, seeing the whole thing as a bit of a dark horror farce.