Science Fiction – Page 9 – Yesterday's Movies

Primer

November 26, 2015November 26, 2015temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I’m not sure how long ago this movie came to my attention. I think it might have been when this comic was published, which was roughly six years ago, but I’m not sure but that it hadn’t come up before then. It seems to have the reputation of being the densest time travel movie ever, but then it seems a vast majority of the audience couldn’t understand Back to the Future Part 2.

The most specific thing I know about the plot is that it concerns a time machine with rules often cited as probable for potential real time machines, but rarely used in fiction because it limits the kinds of stories that can be told. The title always makes me think of a textbook, but I think it’s more likely to be about priming the machine due to those operational restrictions.

Between the highly cerebral reputation, the independent production, and a synopsis I saw that is likely to just be describing the first scene in a zero-tolerance approach to spoilers, it seems entirely likely that this could be an hour and a half of two guys in a room talking about what they’re going to do with the machine and only at the end revealing the actual result. I have seen duller “people just talking” movies about mindbending concepts. (See Mindwalk, which adapted a nonfiction book about physics by having a few characters meander through an art gallery talking. Or maybe don’t.)

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Alien

November 6, 2015temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This is definitely not part of the Movie Monster Month series. Because it’s a new month, of course.

I have the impression that this movie basically invented Sci-Fi-Action-Horror as a subgenre, or at least is why it’s so predominant. I don’t dislike that combination, but I do mind that it seems to have choked out the alternatives, at least through the 80s and 90s.

But anyway, this is very ingrained in culture, so the scariest part is that I haven’t seen it yet. Ripley is up there with Sarah Connor (in Terminator 2) for awesome female heroes, and John Hurt’s most famous role is as the guy who explodes. ~~There’s a walking backhoe fight.~~ (That’s Alien 2 I think) These are things it’s impossible not to know.

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Earth vs. The Flying Saucers

October 30, 2015May 12, 2016temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I’m closing the month with another sci-fi B-movie. I’m not sure how I first heard about this one, but I know it only by the title. It sounds like one Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have riffed, but they haven’t (at least, a cross-reference search only points to an episode for Earth vs. The Spider). It’s one of the B-Moviest of B-movie titles out there.

Knowing nothing of the plot besides the title (which pretty much spells it all out), I can only assume that the pilots of those flying saucers are eventually shown, so this can count as a monster movie. This seems to be a safe assumption, since the poster appears to show menacing ground troops, but these are either spacesuits, mechs, or robots. Which are probably good enough.

This isn’t in 3D, but I almost feel like I should wear red-blue glasses for it.

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The Man from Planet X

October 2, 2015May 12, 2016temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This sounds like one of the schlockiest sci-fi horror films not involving psychic brains crawling out of their jars or aliens raising zombies from a small town cemetery on the idea that it would get humans’ attention better than just touching down on the White House lawn. The story has the potential to rise above, but with what they had to work with, this is clearly made to shock the popcorn out of your lap.

One of the things that drew me to this movie was that the titular alien is apparently iconic enough to be featured/spoofed in the Area 52 sequence of Looney Toons: Back in Action. I can’t recall offhand if it was the only one I didn’t recognize, but it was very distinctive to be so unfamiliar.

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The Amazing Captain Nemo

August 20, 2015September 10, 2015temporalparadoxLeave a comment

The Return of Captain Nemo. Warner Bros. 1978.

Before watching the movie:

I try to stick to movies with a theatrical release, but I’m not sure this had one, as it was written as a three-part television pilot. I do know that it brings Captain Nemo to the modern era, and it stars Jose Ferrer as Nemo and Burgess Meredith as the bad guy, and the contrast between great cast and silly concept caught my curiosity and attention, and I could not leave it on the shelf.

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The Net

July 17, 2015July 17, 2015temporalparadox1 Comment

Before watching the movie:

I first heard of this movie at least five years ago, and pretty much every time it comes up, it’s being mocked for confusing the Internet with Magic. However, that’s hardly unique in Hollywood, and the main examples I’m thinking of seem less implausible now that the Internet of Things is ~~a trendy consumer electronics buzzword~~ on the horizon.

Basically, Sandra Bullock gets on the wrong side of some Hackers for Reasons, and they use the power of the Internet to destroy her life. The drama comes from the fact that since the assault is Online, her antagonists are basically everywhere yet nowhere. At the time, this was clearly New Things Are Scary But We Don’t Really Understand Them, but I want to see if it’s any better now that technology has gotten its hooks into more things.

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Event Horizon

May 29, 2015May 29, 2015temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I guess before just now I didn’t know anything but the title. So apparently a ship that was lost in a black hole has mysteriously come back, and the people who go investigate discover that it brought Something back with it. It seems to basically be a horror story with sci-fi trappings, so I wonder how much it’s indebted to Alien, when I was picturing something more like The Fifth Element or The Black Hole (three films I have yet to see as well). I suspect the main reason I have it connected to The Fifth Element in my head is because of similar looming heads posters and proximity of release dates, but also possibly they were stored close to each other in a friend’s collection. As a tense horror film, I don’t know how much to expect as far as visual and practical effects, and the only name I recognize among the top billing is Laurence Fishburne. So I don’t have much of any foundation for expectations here. Continue reading →

Total Recall

April 10, 2015April 10, 2015temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

Why is it that Hollywood seems to like Phillip K. Dick more than any other SF writer? Off the top of my head, there’s Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Looking it up, I was surprised to learn that the recent The Adjustment Bureau is another adaptation of his, as well as almost as many more I hadn’t even heard of, including two television series.

I recall the short story this is based on “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” as a cerebral thriller, while this movie seems to be positioned as an action-packed blockbuster. To be fair, I can certainly see the room to open up the plot with action sequences.

I feel like this is one of those movies that if it wasn’t rated R I would have seen it ages ago. It came out only two years after I was born and its staying power has only been diminished by having a recent remake. If I’d been 17 in the 90s, I probably would have been invited to watch it with someone before the decade ended, or been invested enough to make the effort myself. However, in the last ten years it’s just been on a shelf or digital shelf somewhere, with no particular reason to make “I’ll watch it someday” into “I’ll watch it now”, until well, now.

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Monkey Business

March 20, 2015March 20, 2015temporalparadox1 Comment

Before watching the movie:

Here’s another that I found rattling around my automated recommendations, having never heard of it before The log line for this movie goes something like “a scientist discovers the fountain of youth, and a screwball comedy ensues”. It looks like there’s a love triangle, and there’s probably some dispute over who gets control over the youth serum, but I’m fairly clueless about it otherwise. Maybe it’s a bit like The Man in the White Suit?

I often think about how I’d like to watch a movie without knowing anything other than the genre, the cast, and the title, if that. But while it’s nice to watch a movie without preconceptions, it’s not as enjoyable to write about a lack of them.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Cary Grant handle witty screwball dialogue well before, but I don’t think I know Ginger Rogers as anything but Fred Astaire’s dancing partner, which now occurs to me as almost certainly unfair to her.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers

March 6, 2015March 6, 2015temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I don’t normally like to see remakes before the original. When I do see the 1956 version, hopefully this won’t color it too much. However, the reason this is line-jumping is because I wanted to respect the death of Leonard Nimoy and this has turned out to be pretty much the only work he was involved in available to me that I haven’t seen and is a movie.

At any rate, this is billed as a “reimagining”, and appears to do a decent job at making the story relevant to the late 70s, which is always a problem when remaking science fiction decades later. I take it from the recommendation that brought this to my attention that Nimoy’s role is fairly significant, though I don’t know much about his star capital between Star Trek leaving television and entering theaters to judge whether he was a big enough name to get on the poster for minor roles.

I don’t want to make this post all about Nimoy, but it occurs to me that I may never have seen him play an onscreen role besides Spock.

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