Category Archives: Science Fiction

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage    4 stars

I went to see Venom: Let There Be Carnage without having seen the original Venom, thus not knowing what to expect. This movie out of the Marvel universe can be described as a buddy B-movie with plenty of humor about a codependent relationship between a man and his alien symbiote. The premise had been set up in the original with failed journalist, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) having formed a bond with a bodyless alien intelligent being called Venom. Venom helps Eddie out with his writing, crime solving career and in return Venom, gets to eat the heads of bad guys. The charm of the movie comes with the comic banter between the two with Venom using an inner voice in conversations with Eddie. And there is a tremendous amount of energy involved in Venom’s antics with his tentacles in the small apartment they share with a pair of chickens. The relatively short movie (for a Marvel movie) does have something of a plot involving a serial killer on death row named Cletus (a fiendish Woody Harrelson) who grants an interview to Eddie with dire consequences. It takes about half the movie before the real villain appears in the form of another alien symbiote who calls himself Carnage and the inevitable battle ensues. (Just the name of this movie gives you a good clue about the level of violence you are about to see.) Director Andy Serkis uses Hardy’s acting skills well in the funny codependent conversations in which Hardy voices both Eddie and Venom. I occasionally like to try out a good B-movie and this one was just the ticket.

The Wild Robot

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The Wild Robot                 5 stars

In DreamWorks’s animated feature The Wild Robot by Chris Sanders AI meets motherhood. Sanders previously directed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon for DreamWorks and now returns with another winner. The premise of this beautifully animated film has to do with a shipwrecked robot that is lost on an isolated island far removed from all humankind. The robot, called Rozzum Unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), is programmed to serve and to obey all requests. She must complete every task when asked and frequently asks for feedback. In this new environment though, the furry and feathery inhabitants only fear this large menacing thing and usually just run away (except for the bear). After much confusion and getting thoroughly banged up, the robot goes into hibernation and through its artificial intelligence learns the language of the animals of the wild, but this still does not lead to much progress. Then, Roz as she comes to be known accidentally becomes acquainted with a new hatchling gosling after accidentally killing its mother. The gosling becomes completely attached to Roz and follows the robot everywhere. Thanks to a wily fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal), who has been watching all of this, Roz comes to realize that her new job is to care for the gosling, now named Brightbill (Kit Connor) and raise him until he becomes mature enough to fly on his own and leave the island. What follows is a series of comedic frustrations as Roz tries to find ways of feeding Brightbill and training him to swim and to fly. Every parent will recognize that this is what it is like to raise a child. Roz learns that not everything comes with analysis and logic, but from the heart, (a line that is said more than a few times). This theme accounts for about two thirds of the movie. In the last third, a villain is introduced in the form of robots from the human city Roz came from who venture to the isolated island to bring Roz back to civilization. The lead robot, (voiced by Stephanie Hsu of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once) a floating drone with long tentacles for arms is especially menacing. The movie then becomes a confrontation between the robots and the animals of the forest, symbolizing man’s destructive nature on the environment. I much prefer the earlier part with Roz interacting with the animals of the island to this part of the movie. The Wild Robot is highly entertaining and suitable for all ages. Look for it to earn a Best Animated Feature nomination. Also, the song “Kiss the Sky”, sung by Maren Morris could earn a Best Song nomination.

Don’t Look Up

Don’t Look Up   2 ½ stars

I was among the first to view Adam McKay’s new satirical comedy Don’t Look Up, just released in theaters. McKay has previously brought us The Big Short and Vice, both inventive and amusing films. In Don’t Look Up we have a star-studded cast in a movie about the approaching end of the world. Leonardo DiCaprio is Michigan State astronomer Dr. Randall Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence (who we haven’t seen much of lately outside of The X-Men franchise) is grad student Kate Dibiasky who have just discovered a new comet in the solar system. Unfortunately for them and the rest of humanity the calculations show that the five to ten kilometer wide comet will crash into earth in just six months and will cause a cataclysmic event and destroy all human life. The Don’t Look Up title refers to the faction of disbelievers who deny the facts before them including the visible comet in the sky. The parallels to the environmental crisis and the denials we see are obvious. Most people are more interested in following social media and watching what is going on with their favorite pop stars than the stories of impending doom. (Good for Ariana Grande mocking herself.) Even President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her dimwitted son Jason, serving as White House Chief of Staff (Jonah Hill) cannot be bothered with listening to science and just want to move on. (The elections are coming soon.) A lot of the humor is a spot on indictment our media obsessed culture in America, but overall the movie goes overboard on the ridiculous plot, including a tech mogul (Mark Rylance) who is more interested in profiting from the situation than saving the planet. The movie, at two and a quarter hours could have been much shorter and did not have to rely on so much CGI effects to make its point. I read that many of the stars jumped at the chance to be in this satire, but after a while I thought the point had been made. The rest was unnecessary flush and craziness.

Love and Monsters

Love and Monsters         4 ½ stars

It’s almost Christmas so what better time to see a movie about the end of the world? In the action comedy Love and Monsters we follow the exploits of Joel, a young twenty something man on a journey to be reunited with his high school sweetheart. The only thing is that most of the human population has been wiped out by giant mutant creatures that have infested the planet after multiple rockets were fired into space to destroy a comet that was on a collision course with earth. But the pollution from the rockets resulted in said mutant creatures. Does this sound completely implausible? Yes, but don’t worry about it. Joel leaves his underground colony of fellow citizens on an 85 mile journey across hostile terrain to find his love, Aimee, who he has not seen in seven years. Along the way he is accompanied by a dog named Boy who aids him as he battles some giant carnivorous creatures. So far this sounds like a very tame variation on A Boy and His Dog. (If you haven’t seen the movie from the seventies you should check it out.) This movie, though is very family friendly due to the personality of the star, Dylan O’Brien as Joel. Like any family oriented movie it has a positive message like learning to gain self confidence and to appreciate those we love. It deserves some special recognition for some impressive effects that bring the monsters to life. I didn’t know what to expect when I started the movie, but found it enjoyable. It seemed odd though that there was a near lack of firearms with the humans relying mostly on crossbows, spears and swords for defense. Along with an occasional hand grenade.

Something In The Dirt

Something In the Dirt                                                     2 suns

In this story about paranormal activity, Levi has just moved to a new apartment in the Hollywood Hills where he strikes up an acquaintance with long time resident John. Then the two witness the impossible in Levi’s apartment as objects seem to float in the air and light emanates into the room with no source. The dives into endless tangents involving numerology, the Pythagorean Brotherhood, alien fruit, a perfect ratio and long dead city planners as this weird pair of random dudes try to solve the mysteries of the universe. They come up with the idea of making a documentary about the experiences, but their own incompetence gets in the way. Flash forward scenes with interviews of others linked to the documentary lead us to believe that the plan went awry at some point. This low budget movie was made mainly by three close friends in the apartment owned by one of them. It’s a fairly long movie that just is forever following the rabbit hole. It is silly and in the Q&A we learn that at one point the movie was three and a half hours long. We also learn that Something in the Dirt is the fifth movie created by this group of friends. I will not be seeking out their earlier works.

Neptune Frost

Neptune Frost                   1 sun

Neptune Frost is a futuristic science fiction story set in Africa with an all African cast and filmed in Rwanda. It concerns a rebellion of miners against an authoritarian state that is led by an intersex runaway named Neptune who is able to affect events through the internet. There is much poetic language and imaginative music involved and much use of discarded computer parts to create the art in the film. Though creative, this film just did not connect with me. I think it shares some themes of William Gibson science fiction novels, but it took a while before I started to get the ideas behind it.

I Think We’re Alone Now

I Think We’re Alone Now              2 ½ stars

I Think We’re Alone Now is yet another movie about the end of the world, a common theme nowadays. I finally got around to seeing this film that premiered at Sundance in 2018. Peter Dinklage is Del, the seeming lone survivor of the apocalypse, who spends his days gathering and burying the bodies of the dead and cleaning the houses in his neighborhood. As an introvert, Del seems perfectly fine with this new reality spending time in a library reading and sipping wine until his world is interrupted by the arrival of Grace (Elle Fanning), a loud and talkative teenage girl who is the opposite of Del. At first Del is annoyed by the girl but gradually accepts her and her assistance in cleaning up this world. Both actors are excellent and very well suited to their roles. Dinklage is exceptional at conveying emotions without speaking. The movie is more about a developing relationship than anything about the end of the world. In fact we never find out what the cause is, only that it happened very suddenly. Then the movie takes an abrupt turn revealing that things are not at all what they seem. It turns into something out of The Twilight Zone leaving us to think, “But how did that happen?” The movie is trying to deliver a message that we can grow through pain and sadness, but does it with a plot twist that didn’t seem all that genuine. I have a hard time with movies that have this much of a change in its reality.

Oxygen

Oxygen                 3 stars

Oxygen is a new sci-fi horror thriller from director Alexandre Aja that has one of the most limited sets I have ever seen. It opens with a young woman (Melanie Laurent of Operation Finale and Now You See Me) who awakens inside a futuristic cryogenic pod with only a computer voice named MILO for company. She is told that her oxygen supply is running out and to make matters worse she has no memory of where she is or even who she is. To say the movie is thin on plot is a colossal understatement. The woman slowly pieces together who she is through visual clues provided by MILO who is not always very helpful, and phone calls she is able to make to the authorities who it seems have something to hide. The hidden secrets eventually do get revealed but the events seemed to take forever to get there. It helps not to think about the situation too much or you will start to see some holes in the story. The movie is aided by a great performance by Laurent who puts plenty of energy into this very limited role. In fact the entire movie depends on how convincing she is. The movie could have been significantly shorter without losing any of the story. The director is known for other stylistic horror thrillers like Crawl, Horns and Piranha, so if you have seen any of these you have some idea of what to expect. The movie is in French with subtitles. If you ever saw the French horror film High Tension (also filled with plot holes) you will know what I mean. Oxygen is available on Netflix.

Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future                       3 ½ stars

After a long absence from filmmaking, David Cronenberg, the master of the “body horror” film, has returned with his new offering “Crimes of the Future”. People familiar with his work will recognize him for such sci-fi horror films as Videodrome, Scanners, The Fly and eXistenZ. His style includes images of gory, grisly mutilations of bodies and he is not letting us down in Crimes. So get ready for the gore. There is too much to describe here, but the setting is a time in the future when evolution has removed the threat of pain and infection from our lives and some people have gained the ability to rapidly evolve their own bodies. One such person is Saul Tenser (a handsome Viggo Mortenson), a performance artist who allows surgeries to be performed on him in public by his associate Caprice (Lea Seydoux) by means of an autopsy machine that is operated by a remote control that seems to resemble a vagina. During these autopsies any new “organs” that Saul has managed to grow inside his body are removed and displayed with Caprice making sketches of the new creation. As Tenser says, surgery has become the new sex and it is there to be viewed by a live audience. Tenser gains the attention of many individuals including the director of The National Organ Registry, a man seeking his skills for a “live autopsy” and a “New Vice Unit” agent seeking information on illegal activity. The feel of the movie is aided by the scenes of bodies being cut open with automated steel scalpels  and some interesting furniture pieces including a bed that looks like an open cocoon and a chair made of bones. There is a lot of talk about the meaning of art and beauty and many dark interior scenes and secret meetings. Unfortunately, the film seemed to end rather abruptly leaving one with a rather empty feeling at the end. This is a true Cronenberg film. It will not be for everyone.

Nope

Nope                     4 ½ stars

Nope is Jordan Peele’s the third horror production and this one brings all the classic aspects of traditional Hollywood monster movies together, only set against a wide-open western frontier. Like his previous movies Get Out and Us, Peele tells his stories from a uniquely black perspective. In Nope, early on we are introduced by Keke Palmer’s Emerald Haywood to a story about the first “moving picture” which featured a two second clip of a galloping horse with a black rider, whose name is missing from history. Emerald claims that the man was her ancestor and in a way this reminds us of the role that Black Americans played in taming the West and in the early days of moviemaking. Emerald’s brother is OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) who runs the family ranch in the foothills of northern California that they inherited from their father who dies mysteriously early in the movie. Eventually OJ becomes aware that there is something strange going on as mysterious lights appear in the sky and the horses have a tendency to get spooked and run away. With the help of a tech store clerk, (Brandon Perea) the team puts together a video surveillance system in order to capture the alien visitors on film. Before we get a good look at the aliens there is a good indication of the level of horror we are in for when in a flashback we see an especially troubling incident involving one of the characters that occurs on live TV. (We learn there is a reason that chimpanzees do not appear in commercial TV shows.) Midway through the movie Peele takes us from glimpses of the threat, ala Jaws, to the full-on terror of facing the enemy. He gives us a cacophony of voices and noise and blood-soaked terrain as our heroes struggle to get the images recorded while at the same time surviving the assault. Through it all, the quiet OJ is amazingly cool and calm as he plans what his next move should be, (sort of a Clint Eastwood character in a classic western). Palmer, though much more vocal shows how resourceful her character can be. Peele’s hit blockbuster of the summer expands his story telling skills beyond what we have seen before. You will have to go see it in the theater to really get the full experience of this horror movie.