Category Archives: Science Fiction

I Think We’re Alone Now

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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.

The Midnight Sky

The Midnight Sky             2 stars

The Midnight Sky, directed by and starring George Clooney was released at the end of 2020 during the pandemic but I never heard of it until over a year later. Judging by its media presence few people had seen it. This science fiction drama concerns a reclusive genius scientist named Augustine Lofthouse who has isolated himself at an arctic research station as a catastrophe threatens to destroy most of the human population on Earth. So you know right away that we are in for some heavy drama of the hopeless variety. Added to the mix is a group of astronauts and scientists who are headed back to Earth after a several years long mission to investigate the habitat on a distant moon of the planet Jupiter. Unfortunately, no one has informed the crew of the spaceship of the recent developments back home. So it falls on Augustine to find a way to contact them and reveal the bad news and warn them that they would be better off not returning to Earth. (Nevermind that his communication with the ship happens instantaneously despite the fact that the ship is still in deep space.) We are never told exactly what happened, but we assume there must be a radioactive atmosphere around most of the planet due to some human activity. The movie moves at a very slow pace and has an ominous tone to it that really gets depressing. There are a few flashbacks to the young Augustine where we find out he had a promising family life at some point and that it all changed leading him to a lonely life. Some harrowing moments are experienced by Augustine and by the ship’s crew that they manage to survive, but this does little to take us away from the doomed feeling we get from the film. There is nothing fun or for that matter thrilling about the movie. It certainly is no Gravity. There is a plot twist in the movie that I won’t describe, but will only say that I thought the filmmakers were setting this up in a deceptive manner by holding back certain facts until they are revealed at the end. I have not appreciated this type of plot device in other movies and was sorry to see it here. There must be better ways to treat the subject of global disaster than what The Midnight Sky has done. I will say that the special effects used to create the spaceship were impressive. If only they had been used in a better movie.

The Vast of Night

The Vast of Night              4 ½ stars

I first heard of The Vast of Night in the early days of the pandemic and finally saw it recently. This is a very low budget science fiction thriller set in a 1950’s small town in New Mexico. Two nerdy teenagers, Everett (Jake Horowitz) and Fay (Sierra McCormick) are not interested in the night’s high school basketball game, preferring to spend the evening talking about their technical pursuits like recording conversations on Fay’s new tape recorder and going to their night jobs as a radio DJ for Everett and a switchboard operator for Fay. But this is a night unlike any other when they hear strange sounds over the telephone and learn of bizarre reports of something in the sky. Things are slow through the first half hour of the movie but pick up as the pair track down older people who have stories from their past about strange happenings involving government UFO projects and disappearances of people. The film pays homage to some of the science fiction movies of the 50’s and uses some interesting techniques like filming with a camera soaring through windows and through the streets of the town. McCormick performs magnificently in one scene where she works the switchboard for what seems like ten minutes gradually picking up clues from callers that something is amiss. The scene is done in one continuous take. The film really picks up the pace in the final twenty minutes as the two get closer to the truth about what could be an alien invasion. This is the first movie made by Andrew Patterson who filmed it in Texas on a shoestring and came up with something that is truly original.

Animalia

Animalia 3 1/2 stars

Animalia is an unusual science fiction story set in Morocco about some strange happenings that lead to an alien presence that affects the natural world and humans.  Itto is very pregnant and is to be left alone in the family’s opulent mansion while husband,  Amine is away on business.  A state of emergency is declared because of odd weather happenings and Itto is forced to evacuate with some help from the local peasants, but the locals resent her expensive trappings and she is stranded in a village far from her husband. There she sees animals that behave strangely. We never actually see the aliens.  We only see the effect they have on people as those affected become blissful and content giving us the feeling that the world is about to change.  The movie is hopeful,  but exposes the distinction in people based on class differences.  The filmmaker,  Sofia Alaoui is French-Moroccan and previously made the sci-fi short,  So What If The Goats Die which I saw at a previous Sundance. The French title is Parmi Nous which means Among Us. Animalia won the Special Jury Award: Creative Vision. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga              5 stars

Mad Max. The name conjures up visions of gangs on roaring motorcycles and tricked out old cars racing through the desert wasteland after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed most of civilization. This is the world first created by George Miller back in 1979 with the release of Mad Max. Now we have Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth installment of the series and it is as full of action and mayhem as any of the others. Plus, we get a fuller view of the life of Furiosa, the woman who raged across the desert against a murderous gang in the movie Fury Road that starred Charlise Theron nine years ago. Furiosa gives us the young hero’s origin story told over five acts and two and a half hours of car and motorbike chases with death defying stunts and murderous mayhem with some of the weirdest looking odd balls we’ve encountered since Fury Road. And it is the first time that Mad Max, last played by Tom Hardy, does not appear in the movie. For the first hour we follow the journey of the young girl, Furiosa (Alyla Browne) who is abducted from The Green Place, a sort of paradise in the desert, by a group of biker degenerates and brought back to the base of their outlaw gang, but only after Furiosa’s mother tracks them and kills almost all of them. There, she meets the leader of the gang, a self-absorbed psychopath named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth playing the villain in a most unusual casting choice). Dementus kills the mother, giving the young Furiosa the rage that so defines her character in the times to come. In this society, located in the Wastelands of Australia, the various gangs are led by warlords who rule cruelly over their subjects. They live in places with names like The Citadel, Bullettown and Gasland. These characters have some very descriptive names like The People Eater, Rictus Erectus and Scrotus. Eventually, Furiosa is traded to one of these warlords where she is to live with the leader’s harem of women. There, she learns the ways of the gangs, disguised as a boy, taking on a new role as a valuable sidekick to Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). The adult Furiosa is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, the striking model from Last Night in Soho and The Queen’s Gambit. Taylor-Joy has an intensity in the role that can be seen in her face as she methodically goes about making repairs on the war-rig, stares down her enemies or puts a bullet in them. One feels the pain she goes through and can then better understand the actions of her future self in Fury Road. George Miller said that it was after seeing Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho, that he knew he had found the young Furiosa. Taylor-Joy can seemingly easily handle maneuvering a car in the desert though she says she has never had a driver’s license. The action set pieces as imagined by George Miller are astounding in their execution. In one sequence we see a chrome plated diesel truck defended by the white War Boys from an attacking horde of bikers, some of them on hang gliders. One by one each attacker is picked off by physical assault, gunshot or being crushed by the truck’s wheels. This scene lasts probably fifteen minutes and is accompanied by a heart pounding steady beat the entire time. Such scenes are designed to get the viewers’ adrenaline pumping and they succeed. This is just one of the many thrilling action scenes brought to the screen. I understand that the story was actually written by Miller before Fury Road was filmed and that it took ten years of preparation to assemble the collection of hot rods, bikes and trucks to make such a wonder of a film. If you are a fan of action movies, this is the one you should not miss this summer.

Dune

Dune     4 stars

I finally saw 2021’s Dune by Denis Villeneuve having missed it in the theaters. It has to be one of the greatest challenges in making movies to attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel to the silver screen and Villeneuve was feeling up to it. In the story we follow young Paul Atreites who is destined to lead his house and people through a great struggle across the galactic empire. Timothée Chalamet with his ability to convey a dark sullen mood is excellently cast as Paul who is plagued with frightening visions of the future because he was bred to be the one to guide mankind through this period by the witches of the Bene Gesserit. If you are not already familiar with the book, I certainly can’t explain this complex story to you here, but I can say that the movie does capture the grand scale of Dune with the huge set pieces of the cities, the flying ships, the immense temples and of course the giant sand worms of Arrakis. The importance of Arrakis lies in its abundance of mélange, the spice that makes galactic space travel practical. There are some well staged hand-to-hand combat scenes both between armies and individuals that even show the effects of the Holtzmann shields. We get a good taste of the vastness of the Arrakis desert and the devotion of the Fremen to the land and their way of life. Many of the cast do credit to their Dune characters including Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreites, Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Jason Momoa as the charismatic and loyal Duncan Idaho and Stellan Skarsgárd as the obese and beyond evil Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. There are many other cast members who played their limited parts well that I can’t name here. For the most part the characters seem faithful to the book. One change was to make the Fremen scientist Liet Kynes a woman as played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster. The character was even expanded compared to the book. Two characters missing from the movie are Feyd Rautha Harkonnen and Princess Irulan. The nature of the story requires a certain quality of mysticism, especially with the scenes dealing with Paul and the Bene Gesserit, so there is not always a completely human aspect to the story. The movie is necessarily the first part of a pair of movies so while it ends on a hopeful note, it does not feel quite complete. We are still waiting for part two which is promised to show up next year. I am to understand that the job of playing Feyd Rautha will fall to Austin Butler (from Elvis). I look forward to seeing what he does with that. There have been other versions of Dune in the past and this one is likely the most faithful to the book, but we will have to see what Part 2 has to offer. Also, I have read that there is a prequel in the works that focuses on the origins of the Bene Gesserit 10,000 years in the past.

Nimona

Nimona                 4 stars

From the studios of Annapurna and Netflix comes the animated movie, Nimona, originally a graphic novel by ND Stephenson. This energetic story takes place in a futuristic medieval kingdom where knights wear suits of armor, carry swords that fire energy beams and ride around in flying cars through the streets of a busy metropolis. Everyone there is aware of the legend of Gloreth, who defeated a fearsome monster a thousand years ago and is still revered. In the present we meet Ballister (Riz Ahmed), a knight who has few friends, but is close to fellow knight, Ambrosius Goldenloin, a descendant of Gloreth. It is clear that the two men have a romantic relationship, with this being the most gay-friendly animated movie I can remember. Early is the story, poor Ballister is framed for a murder and the knights of the kingdom are tasked with hunting him down. But Ballister is befriended by a young girl named Nimona (Chloe Grace Moretz) who isn’t all she appears to be at first. Nimona is a shapeshifter, a being that is not human and can assume the appearance of any creature in an instant and is practically invulnerable to things that would be fatal to a human. She is also a thousand years old and the only one of her kind. Ballister and Nimona see something in each other with Nimona wanting to protect Ballister and clear his name of the crime. She protects him by changing into a rhinoceros, an ostrich, a small bird and even a whale among other animals and runs circles around the hapless knights. Besides fighting knights she loves to wreck things destroying structures and statues that get in the way and doing it all in a bright shade of pink. It is apparent that the character is a stand in for a transperson. She is reviled by all and at one point says she doesn’t know what is worse, knowing that everyone wants to drive a sword through her heart or wanting them to do it. Nimona is seen as a monster to the population, but we learn that this image is really a creation by a society unwilling to accept someone that is different from everyone else. She is alone in this world and desperately needs to connect to someone. Besides the message, the movie has plenty of comic bits for the kids and plenty of action that will keep their attention. The movie was originally a project of Blue Sky Studios, which was acquired by Disney. Disney apparently thought the film was too gay for them and shut it down at which point Annapurna took over to complete it. The LGBTQ nature of the characters will not be lost on anyone. Good for the filmmakers for having the vision to see the project through.