Star Trek Beyond Movie Review

One of the great things about Star Trek, be it any of the series or many of the feature films, is the way it has always put ideas at the forefront of its stories, valuing philosophy and political science above action and swashbuckling. Even First Contact, my absolute favorite of all the movies, found a way to work some excellent action sequences into a film that was mostly about ideas and really developed some of the characters.

Midnight Special Movie Review

The enticement of big studio backing, larger budgets, and wider distribution must be great to successful indie filmmakers. Jeff Nichols had a string of well-received films that did well on the festival circuit and then got a lot more money for his fourth feature, Midnight Special. Unlike what often happens with directors who display talent on the small scale, Nichols didn’t move on to the latest superhero movie or some other blockbuster. Instead he took the money to make his own story and make it without the limitations he surely faced in the past due to budget constraints.

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens Movie Review

J.J. Abrams took the reins of the Star Wars franchise and reinvigorated it with The Force Awakens, otherwise known as Episode VII and taking place some three decades or so after the vents of Return of the Jedi. This new chapter is a more than welcome addition following the ill-reputed prequel trilogy and even the Special Edition versions of the original trilogy.

Ex Machina Movie Review

It’s worth admiring a movie that attempts to tell a story of big ideas and deal with philosophical challenges, even if the execution isn’t what one might consider perfect. If there’s at least a modicum of kill and effort put into the craft of the storytelling and filmmaking, any missteps are easy to gloss over. Alex Garand’s Ex Machina, a science-fiction thriller takes the issue of artificial intelligence and cuts to the core of meaning behind consciousness and, by extension, humanity.

Short Cut Movie Review: Oblivion

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

Oblivion is a movie that looks almost perfect in terms of production design and visual effect. It deftly recalls and references several science fiction classics, but then fails to live up to the standards set by those that came before.

Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, a technician working to repair battle drones on earth that are in place to defend some big energy-producing machines from attack by Scavs, an alien race that lost a war with humans several decades ago. He explains everything in a narration that precedes the title. If you miss anything, don’t fret because it is all repeated almost verbatim later in the film as dialogue between Jack and Beech (Morgan Freeman), the leader of a band of humans found to still be living on earth.

Gravity Movie Review

Gravity is a beautiful and poetic movie. It is a technical marvel and one of the tensest 90 minutes of movie viewing I can recall. And it is about one of the little talked about, but ever present, dangers of space travel and orbiting earth.

There are so many satellites floating around up there and every now and then something comes apart, leaving space junk out there. This space junk sometimes travels at mind-boggling speeds. If it comes into contact with a shuttle or another satellite or an astronaut on a spacewalk, it could have devastating consequences. The particular event in Gravity, directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón, along with his son Jonás, is the destruction by missile of a Russian satellite. All those little pieces of debris are orbiting at a speed of 20,000 kilometers per hour. They rip through the space shuttle where mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are completing work on the Hubble. The two are left stranded in space, their only remaining hope being the escape pods on the International Space Station. And at the speed the debris is traveling, they have about 90 minutes before they’re in for another shit storm.

Elysium Movie Review

If Neill Blomkamp isn’t careful, he’s going to be forever remembered as a writer-director of allegorical science fiction. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but remember M. Night Shyamalan survived for a handful of films being known for doing something very specific and then became so hamstrung by a sense of his own greatness that his films became, one after another, more absurd and awful than the last. If District 9 was Blomkamp’s take on apartheid South Africa and immigration, Elysium is not just about a guy trying to illegally enter a forbidden and exclusive paradise to cure himself of fatal radiation exposure. Working on a larger scale and with a bigger budget, Blomkamp hasn’t lost sight of what makes a good movie work: namely good characters and story. He’s also made another technically sound piece of entertainment that puts most of the other big releases to shame. A coherently edited and structured movie? Who greenlit this thing? I’m almost shocked this sort of thing is allowed to pass muster.

Classic Movie Review: Planet of the Apes

As I’m not in the habit of keeping the lid on a secret movie ending that’s 45 years old, I suggest you stop reading now if you’ve never seen and don’t know the ending of Planet of the Apes. If you also don’t know what Rosebud is or that Holly Martens faked his own death, then you need to go back to school. Also, Janet Leigh is killed in the first 40 minutes of Psycho. I mention these things because they are such well-known and deeply engrained plot points of famous movies that it’s virtually impossible to have a discussion about them while maintaining the secret.

Primer Movie Review

“The permutations were endless.”

I saw it in cinemas nine years ago, but all I remembered was that I liked it and thought it was a unique and confident first feature from a man named Shane Carruth. When his second feature played Sundance and then received a small theatrical release earlier this year, I was reminded that I should take another look at Primer. This second viewing I’m sure I paid closer attention, especially knowing that the details, plot intricacies, and timelines are utterly confounding, but even having some idea of what was to come doesn’t really help you get a firm grasp on what’s happening.

Frankenweenie Movie Review

Tim Burton has spent his entire filmmaking career searching for the magic of those old science fiction and horror films of the 1950s and 1960s. That’s the stuff he grew up on and it obviously touched him on a personal level because almost everything he does pays homage in some way to them. Ed Wood is both biography and homage to the director of the cheapest “so bad it’s good” B-movies. His latest film, and first stop-motion animation as director, is Frankenweenie, which happens also to be a remake of an early short film he made in 1984, before he ever stepped behind the camera for a full-length feature. The original short film runs 25 minutes and stars Daniel Stern and Shelley Duvall as the parents of a boy who loves his dog, Sparky, and directing cheap 8mm films in the back yard (like Burton did as a boy). After the dog dies in an accident, the boy uses science to reignite life in his dead beloved, much to the dismay of the townspeople, who, in the spirit of Frankenstein, burn down an old windmill in an attempt to destroy the grotesquery of resurrected death.

Jason X Movie Review

Just like with the previous film in the series eight years earlier, I only watched this for a sense of completion. Technically I shouldn't have even included it in this October series as it's meant to be a personal journey through my childhood memories of horror films, but I also wanted to list out all the deaths in the Friday the 13th series. Also, it just seemed wrong to leave this out. My friend and I rented this ten years ago and had good fun with it.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

I’m trying to imagine how the idea for Jason X was pitched to New Line Cinema in such a way that they were willing to give it a green light. Not only that, but it actually got a theatrical release. How do you think they sold an idea for Jason Voorhees to be frozen and then thawed out 450 years in the future so that he can continue his killing spree aboard a space ship? “Get this: Jason in space,” is the only phrase you would need, I suppose. And if that’s how it was presented, it’s no wonder that what came out the other end of production was the mind-blowingly bad film I just watched – for the second time! Yes, I watched it on a lark with a friend many years ago. How could we not? But I had blocked most of it out. Readers, I assure you that this is a true stinker with one minor – very minor – saving grace that I still found hysterical.

Looper Movie Review

When a filmmaker ventures down the wormhole of time travel as a narrative device, he’s setting his film up to be prodded and picked apart in the minutest detail to discover all the flaws and inconsistencies. The best time travel movies tend to be the ones that have some intelligence about the process and implications of traveling to the past, but mostly they succeed when the time travel becomes secondary to other elements in the film.

Take a film like Back to the Future, for example. Yes, without the time travel there is no story, but the breakneck pace, the good writing, the funny jokes all take precedence over the fact of Marty going 30 years into the past. In the case of Rian Johnson’s Looper, I could talk about a paradox that unravels the entire story if we follow logical consistency, but we’re dealing with a science fiction action film that relies on something that doesn’t exist and is only theoretically possible in terms of traveling forward in time. In Johnson’s film, the only time travel happens backward.

Total Recall Movie Review

It’s funny sometimes to revisit a twenty year old film that had groundbreaking visual effects for its day. In some cases (Terminator 2: Judgment Day comes to mind) the effects look about as good as anything today. More often than not, however, they look more like Total Recall There’s plenty to admire in Paul Verhoeven’s science fiction futuristic mind-bender if you can ignore what looks like cheesy B-movie effects. Then again, that B-movie look is somehow more fitting for the movie. After all, its story is the stuff of classic B-movie science fiction.

Prometheus Movie Review

Ridley Scott’s highly-anticipated return to science fiction after a 30 year hiatus turns out to be provocative, fascinating and also deeply flawed. Scott has continued to ride a wave of good will brought about by having directed two of the best science fiction films of all time. Since then, he’s unleashed a stunning torrent of fodder for the masses, the vast majority of which has been utterly forgettable – even the best among them like Black Hawk Down.

In Prometheus he returns to Alien territory in a film that takes place within the same universe, so to speak, but is really cagey about the connections until the end. It takes place about 30 years prior to the events in Alien and like other prequels made long after their predecessors, it suffers from use of technology that is far more advanced than what was used previously. Consider that in Alien a simple two-dimensional grid pattern screen is used for tracking the creature and Dallas, represented by crude dots. In Prometheus, a high tech 3D holographic image of an elaborate system of caves can indicate where ay life is. To the great credit of the production team, the design of the eponymous ship: everything including walls and corridors; doorways and hatches, is fairly consistent with the original. Considering it is still the fictional Weyland Corporation, that makes good sense.

Serenity Movie Review

Seven years ago I went into the cinema to watch Serenity not knowing anything about it. I didn’t know anything about its writer and director Joss Whedon, who already had a cult following for his “Buffy” TV series and its spinoff “Angel.” I had also never heard of his short-lived series “Firefly,” canceled after a mere 13 episodes, which served as a precursor to the film. All I knew was that I was totally enthralled by the universe presented on screen.

Serenity’s amalgamation of the science fiction and western genres was unlike anything I’d seen to that point and in retrospect it’s almost an obvious combination to make. The premise is that 500 years in the future, the earth has become uninhabitable and the population has been relocated to another system of planets terraformed for habitability. There is an alliance that controls the central planets but at the edges of the system life is governed by a kind of Wild West code of justice.

Real Steel Movie Review

Real Steel takes a rather unbelievable premise and turns it into some kind of Over the Top retread. Okay, that’s a flippant comparison because after taking a guy who drives a truck around the country to participate in a competition that must appeal to a niche market and throwing in that guy’s estranged son into the mix until they forge the bonds of a relationship there’s not much to compare really. It also must be said that Real Steel is a far better film than that dreadful Sylvester Stallone vehicle from the 80s.

Modern Classic Movie Review: The Matrix

There are those moments when going to see a new movie in the cinema can allow you to be a witness to a sea change in filmmaking. When The Matrix was released in March 1999 I don’t recall thinking much about it beforehand in the way of anticipation. But when the movie finished, I had but one thought in my head: “Tremendous!”

The Matrix utilized state of the art technology and equipment to employ special effects in ways that augmented the story rather than supplanting it like so much of the effects-driven tripe we see now. Beyond the fantastic look of the film, it’s also a movie that strives to say something interesting. It is philosophical in nature, asking the BIG questions about destiny, technological advancement, the nature of reality and the meanings of these things for humanity. Andy and Larry Wachowski, who wrote and directed the film, are clearly movie and comic book nerds (a term I use without derision) with a solid background knowledge of the classics.

Cowboys & Aliens Movie Review: An Interesting Melding of Genre Films

What a fascinating concept, the mixing of genres in Cowboys & Aliens, director Jon Favreau’s latest action spectacular with enough brains to rise slightly above the usual mediocre dreck. Why must it be inevitable that every science fiction film about alien invasion has either a contemporary or a futuristic setting? If you’ve ever wondered how men on horseback with six-shooters and rifles would fend off technologically superior alien invaders, Cowboys & Aliens is a mash-up that might satisfy your thirst for knowledge. At any rate, all alien invaders are by definition technologically superior to humans.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence Movie Review: The Meeting of Two Worlds

This review was written in July 2001 and is presented here for the first time.

The anticipation surrounding the release of A.I. Artificial Intelligence has been great because it is the melding of two minds: those of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick – two of the most influential filmmakers of the last forty years.

Much of the interest is no doubt a result of these two men having such different approaches to filmmaking. Spielberg is the sentimentalist, always drawing the audience in to emotional (and sometimes schmaltzy) scenes, while Kubrick's films are known for their cold detachment and claustrophobia. So we watch with a keen eye as Kubrick's pet project of the last twenty years unfolds in the hands of Spielberg.

Star Trek First Contact Movie Review

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I’m by no means a “Star Trek” nerd. I’ve enjoyed the show (Original Series and Next Generation) and I’ve seen all the films, but I can’t rattle off facts and episode titles as easily as I can Oscar trivia. The first “Star Trek” film I saw in the cinema was Star Trek: First Contact and I thought it was fantastic straight away. I’ve seen it several times since and I still have to agree it’s not just a good “Star Trek” movie – it’s a good movie.

One of the great things about “Star Trek” has always been its reliance on philosophical ideas and problems to sustain its stories. This was originally in spite of a very low budget on the original series. Even the nadir of “Star Trek” films – Star Trek V: The Final Frontier – at least starts with the premise of an interesting idea, although the realization and execution are dreadful.