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Tag Archives: Science Fiction
Dark City Offers a Solid Rendition of the Usual Green Grime Tropes
Note: This review pertains to the director’s cut of Dark City and contains MAJOR SPOILERS for the film.
What is it about the 1990s that gave us so many films like this one? Whether it’s Dark City, or City of Lost Children, or even The Matrix (which I bet had the word “city” in the title at first), the decade was awash in reality-questioning, green-tinted stories about chosen one saviors breaking through confusing and oppressive systems. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, each of these movies offers the same sense of grime-ridden trippiness, the same sort of heady themes wrapped in a quasi-blockbuster package, and the same type of dreamlike, steampunk-meets-futurism aesthetic.
Posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Movies
Tagged 1990s films, Dark City, Film Reviews, Noir, Rufus Sewell, Science Fiction
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Nightflyers sees George R.R. Martin Head to Deep Space For Syfy
It’s 2093, and the Earth is dying. The crew of the Nightflyer, a bustling human colony ship, is leaving orbit and heading to “The Void” in hopes that they can save it. An alien ship housing a species referred to as “The Volcryn” (a confusing pronunciation for Star Trek fans) is traversing that space, and it’s a long shot, but they may hold the key to fixing our planet.
But the catch is twofold. First, the aliens have ignored all our attempts to contact them, so the humans have reluctantly resorted to enlisting a telepath to help their cause, who may or may not be able to hop on the aliens’ wavelength. Second, in this universe, telepaths are gravely mistrusted after a spate of vaguely-referred-to massacres. So when things start to go terribly wrong on the ship, and main characters and redshirts alike start to experience haunting hallucinations, that mistrust only grows. It quickly becomes apparent that this mission may be doomed before it ever really starts.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged George R.R. Martin, Science Fiction, TV Reviews
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Arrival Is an Intricate Film that Snaps into Place in its Finale
Caution: this review contains major spoilers for the film.
It’s hard to talk about Arrival without spoiling the film. So much of what makes it more than just a well-done first contact story is tied up in its later developments. They recontextualize enough of the prior proceedings that trying to discuss the import or quality of the film without taking it as a whole is like trying to give someone directions without letting them know the destination.
But its premise is deceptively straightforward. In the world of Arrival, aliens have come to Earth in twelve ships scattered across the globe. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a linguist brought by the U.S. Military to a ship located in Montana, in an attempt to help humanity communicate with this extraterrestrial presence. With the help of theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and a buffer provided by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), Banks slowly but surely finds ways to speak with these seemingly unknowable beings, with the American team alternatively working with and against similar groups around the world attempting the same.
Posted in Movies, Prestige Pictures
Tagged Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Movie Reviews, Oscars 2017, Science Fiction
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Star Wars Rebels: The Melancholy Tones of Obi Wan and Darth Maul’s Shared Destiny in “Twin Suns”
The natural inclination in an episode like this one is to go big, to make the proceedings grand and explosive and exciting. It’s the Original Trilogy meeting the Prequel Trilogy meeting Star Wars Rebels, and so the powers that be could be forgiven for turning the whole thing into an epic confrontation, full of piss and vinegar and force-aided fireworks.
Instead, “Twin Suns” is a quieter, deliberate, almost melancholy episode. That’s a bold choice and one that pays off. Instead of a tribute to the pulpy thrills of the old serials that inspired George Lucas, the episode feels like an homage to the more languid tragedies in the Akira Kurosawa Samurai movies that also influenced him. The result is one of Rebels’s most meditative, understated episodes, that uses that ruminative tone to do justice to the major figures it invokes.
Posted in Television
Tagged Darth Maul, Episode Reviews, Ezra Bridger, Obi Wan Kenobi, Science Fiction, Star Wars, Star Wars Rebels
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The Martian Is a Feel-Good Movie that Earns Every Bit of the Feeling
Despite a number of well-crafted elements, the success or failure of The Martian absolutely depended on Matt Damon’s performance in the lead role. It’s true that, in contrast to spiritual predecessors like Gravity and Castaway, the film was not a one-man show, instead featuring a murderer’s row of stellar supporting players. What’s more, its narrative thrills were not limited to its protagonist’s adventures on Mars; The Martian told an equally compelling story of what was happening back home.
But Damon’s Mark Watney, and his lonely trials and tribulations on a desolate planet, were the lifeblood of the film, commanding the lion’s share of its run time and focus. That meant that for much of the movie, Damon alone had to convey his character’s distress, his resolve, his humor, and his humanity, with no one but the camera to talk to. And despite that handicap, he succeeded with flying colors. Few major roles share the degree of difficulty of Damon’s here, where the main character spends much of the film in solitude, with little in the way of major plot developments or action to maintain the energy of the picture, and the performance Damon delivered with that backdrop more than lived up to the challenge.
Posted in Movies, Prestige Pictures, Sci-Fi Movies
Tagged Drew Goddard, Matt Damon, Movie Reviews, Oscars 2016, Ridley Scott, Science, Science Fiction
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Star Wars: The Balance of the Grand and the Intimate in A New Hope
Of all the memorable visual flourishes in the original Star Wars, there are two images that stand out. The first is arguably the most iconic — Luke Skywalker, gazing off at the horizon, as the twin suns set on Tatooine. It represents the promise of adventure, the enormous world that waits beyond the garden gate, and serves as the prelude to his epic journey.
But the second is much simpler. It’s Luke, Leia, and Han, arm-in-arm and filled with joy, as they celebrate their victory over the Empire back at the rebel base. That moment underlines their unlikely friendship, borne out of shared struggles and triumphs, and shows the film’s heart, clearly felt even in the midst of this grand adventure. That contrast is what Star Wars, at least in its original form, comes down to, and what makes the film still so salient and impressive nearly forty years after its release.
Rick and Morty: “Wedding Squanchers” – Leaning Into the Unadulterated Complexity of Rick Sanchez
Who is Rick Sanchez? Is he simply an amoral (or post-moral) mad scientist with a drinking problem? Is he a reluctantly self-sacrificing grandfather who secretly loves the family he occasionally torments? Is he an anti-authoritarian hedonist with no regard for sentient life or anything else that stands in the way of his fun? Is he a man in pain who keeps himself constantly moving forward so as not to have to face his own demons and personal failings? Is he a jaded spacefarer who’s seen a universe’s worth of crap and has to dig through it to recover the remaining scraps of his humanity buried underneath?
Rick Sanchez is all of these things. He’s a man who’s keen to kick back and watch the turmoil of a “Purge Planet” like it’s a spectator sport. He’s a man who’s willing to sacrifice his own life to save his grandson. He’s a man who would create an entire miniature universe, complete with intelligent life just to power his spaceship. He’s a man who attempts to kill himself after being left by an old flame once more and told he’s a bad influence. He’s a man who has fought in a war, walked away from a failed marriage, and accordingly refuses to leave himself vulnerable. And he is also a man who scarred his daughter by abandoning her when she was young, but who later turned himself in to the authorities to keep her and her family from having to live as intergalactic fugitives.
In short, he’s complicated. It’s easy to mistake the divergent takes on the same character that inevitably emerge from the cacophony of voices in a T.V. writer’s room for complexity. But given Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon’s history of writing damaged, multifaceted characters, it’s no stretch to see these characteristics as something more than just a jumbled series of inconsistent traits. Instead, they are signs of the conflicting impulses within one of the most three-dimensional characters to ever anchor a comedy as madcap and irreverent as Rick and Morty.
Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television
Tagged Episode Reviews, Rick and Morty, Rick Sanchez, Science Fiction, TV Reviews
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