The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Sci-Fi
-
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of those imperfect films. No matter how many versions, there’s no way to fix one thing without breaking another–or it might just be broken all together. For example, I don’t know if I’d ever realized how focused director Wise is–during the first hour–on William Shatner’s slightly dangerous desire…
-
The Colony really took four writers? It’s only eighty-some minutes long. Not surprisingly, director Renfroe contributed to the script. Maybe he put in all the terrible action sequences he knew only he could screw up. Renfroe’s not a terrible director. All the new ice age shots are good, the confined dialogue scenes are okay… sure,…
-
A lot of Looper is a film noir set in the near future. Criminal–but basically good guy–Joseph Gordon-Levitt ends up on a farm, as de facto protector to a young woman (Emily Blunt) and her kid. Except this part comes after Looper is an action movie where Gordon-Levitt teams up with his future self (Bruce…
-
Where to start with Europa Report. There are some obvious places. First, it’s in the near future but digital video is about as advanced as it was back in 2004. On a cell phone. Or, you know, the filmmakers wanted to cheap out on the special effects. Another place to start might be the music.…
-
Unfortunate Americanization of the original Japanese GODZILLA adds dubbing and Raymond Burr to the story of a nuclear-powered monster destroying Japan. The whole atom bomb metaphor gets shucked; the script is bad, the shoehorning of Burr is bad (in writing, performance, and direction). See the original. Skip this one. Even if you have nostalgia. DVD,…
-
The Black Hole is a weird–and bad–movie. American science fiction usually avoids religion, at least literalizing religion, but Black Hole embraces it. Maybe I shouldn’t spoil it. But it’s from Disney too. It’s a Disney movie with Heaven and Hell. When the film cuts to Maximilian Schell during these sequences, the film feels like a…
-
Galaxina answers a number of burning questions. Most immediately, it shows practical special effects and miniatures is sometimes not the best way to do special effects. Because auteur William Sachs had a great cinematographer–Dean Cundey–yet the effects work in Galaxina is awful. But it’s not like Cundey shot any of it well. Galaxina apparently had…
-
For Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams operates with an “if it ain’t broke” mentality. It serves him–and the film–fairly well. Except Michael Giacchino’s music. While Abrams goes for sensationalism every time, he does it competently. The Giacchino music, however, is never competent. This Trek tries hard to create mainstream post-modern; it’s a sequel to…
-
There’s not much original about Oblivion. Most of the sci-fi elements are familiar, as are most of the plot twists; the unfamiliar ones play like sci-fi elements no one had been able to do before because the special effects were too expensive. None of that familiarity matters, however, thanks to director Kosinski and star Tom…
-
If only someone involved in Battlefield Earth realized they should be making fun of the story instead of being earnest, it might have some camp value. Instead, between Barry Pepper’s humorless protagonist and John Travolta’s ludicrous villain, Earth is an exasperating affair. No one noticed Forest Whitaker looks like the Cowardly Lion? Really? He looks…
-
In terms of badness, Barbarella is phenomenal. One could spend his or her time on the gender politics–someone must have in the last forty years. The film takes place in a post-gender future, where Jane Fonda’s titular character is the most relied upon person in the galaxy. However, the president (Claude Dauphin) spends the entire…
-
The big problem with The Thing, besides it being pointless (though it needn’t be), is its stupidty. While van Heijningen is a perfectly mediocre director, he doesn’t know how to add mood or make something disturbing. Some of it probably isn’t his fault… I can’t see him caring about the addition of Eric Christian Olsen’s…
-
Where does one even start with Planet of Dinosaurs? The only good thing about the film is some of the scenery… and maybe some of the music from Kelly Lammers and John O’Verlin. Most of the music is quite bad, but the film’s “theme” is this electronic piece and it adds both a sense of…
-
“No character development, please, we’re British.” There’s nothing to recommend The Quatermass Xperiment. Walter J. Harvey’s black and white photography is fantastic, but it can’t recommend the film. Xperiment is so stupid, it appears screenwriters Richard H. Landau and director Guest don’t even know the definition of experiment. The titular Quatermass is Brian Donlevy, who’s…
-
Hardware looks a lot like an A-ha music video… but not in a bad way. Richard Stanley is a decent enough director. The plot’s pretty simple, beneath all the sci-fi decorations. It’s the end of a slasher movie, when the hero or heroine has to fight the villain all by him or herself. There’s no…
-
I always think of Aliens as a precisely choreographed ballet. Director Cameron moves his large cast–though it does winnow over time–around in these cramped sets and everyone has something to do; Cameron draws the viewer’s attention to one character, but the rest are in motion setting up the next moment in the scene. Watching the…
-
Given its $120 million price tag, one might think Prometheus would have a script above Internet fan fiction. It does not. Director Scott is more than happy to run with a dumb script–which often forgets subplots and story threads, not to mention is full of pointless action scenes. Prometheus tries very hard to be smart;…
-
Roger Donaldson has these great sweeping camera shots in Species. He doesn’t restrict them to the action scenes, but uses them to dynamically bring his five principals into the frame together. It’s always beautifully done and, if one could separate Donaldson’s work from the film’s content, Species would seem a lot more impressive. Unfortunately, the…
-
For maybe forty minutes–from twenty minutes in to the hour mark–Lost in Space is actually rather engaging. It’s not any good as a narrative, but Hopkins’s direction of the space sequences is phenomenal. The film opens with something familiar, a dogfight out of Star Wars, but the later sequences are not. They aren’t original, but…
-
Apparently, all Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale needed for a Back to the Future sequel was a story. Part III, unlike the second installment, has a lot going on and it’s not all tied into the original’s storyline. Instead, Michael J. Fox finds himself in the Old West, trying to save Christopher Lloyd. Zemeckis and…
-
What’s interesting about Terminator 3-besides the “I’ll be back” references-is the lack of cheap homage to the first two. It’s an all new Terminator movie. It’s crappy, but it’s its own thing. Though sometimes being its own thing just hurts it-Brad Fiedel’s awesome Terminator theme isn’t used at all. It’s also way too short. Running…
-
A lot of Slipstream plays like The Road Warrior with gliders. In this post-apocalyptic wasteland, everyone flies around because of a jet stream ravaging the surface. It’s never clear where this jet stream is located and not, in a geographic sense, because they always manage to safely take off and land… while at other times…
-
From the director of Breaking Away and one of the many fine writers of the Adam West “Batman” TV show…. Krull is just as unwatchable now as it was the last time I tried to watch it, some eleven years ago. As a kid—assuming kids are the best audience for the film—Krull never registered as…
-
Among Fantastic Voyage‘s many problems, the two salient ones are the general lack of tension and the utter lack of wonderment. Fleischer is responsible for both, though maybe not so much the first. The story can’t really be tense because there’s very little at stake. The film’s principal characters–reduced in size to perform brain surgery…
-
Watching Moon 44, one can imagine Roland Emmerich sitting in a Bonn theater during Blade Runner, loudly opining he can do the same thing. Only with an incompetent German crew. There’s nothing good about Moon 44, as it doesn’t turn out to be a romance between nebbish Dean Devlin and brooding Michael Paré. If it…
-
Moon is quite good. Moon’s not the most impossible film to talk about without spoiling… but some of its goodness is wrapped up in its plot developments. The viewer should get to enjoy Moon without knowing about them in advance. I have to be very careful in terms of those developments. I’ll try to avoid…
-
While the most impressive thing about Real Steel is easily the CG robot boxers, one has to wonder why Shawn Levy didn’t also use computer graphics to make James Rebhorn look more lifelike. Rebhorn, who I was initially happy to see in the opening titles, appears to be wearing a pound of makeup. Steel has…
-
The Land Unknown has it all—a guy in a Tyrannosaurus Rex suit (the dinosaur’s roar is suspiciously similar to Godzilla’s), lizards standing in for dinosaurs, awful rear screen projection of those lizards to make them seem large, CinemaScope, misogyny, torture, a homicidal rapist being portrayed as a sympathetic character and a cute little tarsier. The…
-
I watched It! The Terror from Beyond Space because I understood it’s widely considered (look at that passive voice) a precursor to Alien. Any such connection is tenuous at best. I also thought Ray Harryhausen did the special effects. No, no, he did not. If It! were a production of a middle school theater department–I…
-
Can you even watch Alien if you have epilepsy? After about a hundred minutes of elegant direction, Scott relies on this strobe effect for the remainder of the film’s running time. Yes, it makes a disquieting effect, but it gets old in a few minutes and he uses it for at least fifteen. And, strobe…
The Stop Button 