Movie Reviews

My love affair with Star Wars stopped with Episode III. I was willing to put aside my issues with the weak, convoluted screenplays to Episode I and II, in the hopes that the third installment would tie every thing up nicely. It didn't. In this fan's opinion, Episode III felt just as disconnected to the previous two films as those felt to each other. I'd had enough of Star Wars.

I've only slightly recovered from the 2005 release of Episode III. It doesn't make me angry anymore, but I have little to no interest in the universe I once loved, and that makes me a little bit sad. I can still watch the original trilogy, and appreciate them as films, but I'm not buying the toys, the shirts, the bedsheets, the video games, the kitchen appliances, or the lingerie. My interest in the trappings of Star Wars fandom seems to be dead forever.

I wonder how much of my feelings on Star Wars and its creator George Lucas affected my enjoyment of Alexandre Phillipe's documentary The People Vs. George Lucas. I've not only internalized most of the thoughts conveyed in the film, I've had some of the exact same discussions with my friends that are presented here. Why did George Lucas add so much unnecessary crap to the Special Editions? Why did The Phantom Menace disappoint so much? And what's the deal with Jar Jar Binks?

Over the last few years the creature feature has undergone a bit of a micro-scale renaissance as filmmakers around the world have broken the mold of the classic monster movie. Matt Reeves' Cloverfield combined city-wide destruction with the new boom of single-camera, single-POV style filmmaking. Hitoshi Matsumoto's Big Man Japan was a wry love letter to Japan's fading fascination with its own Kaiju traditions. Joon-ho Bong put an energetic, fascinating South Korean flavor all over the science-run-amok niche with The Host. And with District 9 Neill Blomkamp proved that you can make a blockbuster spectacle without Hollywood's bloated budgets and fascination with A-list actors.

Now indie filmmaker Gareth Edwards has arrived on the scene with Monsters, yet another fresh, unique take on the creature feature. However, unlike all of the aforementioned films, Edwards' goal was not to make a giant monster movie, it was to make a small scale, intimate, on-the-road movie that happens to have giant monsters in it from time to time. It takes place in an alternate reality where a NASA space probe has crashed to Earth, releasing in the process the eggs of an alien race that soon spread across Central America. As a result, half of the United States is turned into a massive quarantine zone bordered by an enormous wall and military presence.

Six years after the world has become accustomed to the contaminated zone, Andrew (Scoot McNairy), a photographer in Mexico, is asked to escort his bosses' daughter, Samantha (Whitney Able), back to America. When an arrangement with a ferry back to America falls through, the unlikely pair are forced to hire a guarded escort to bring them through the contaminated zone over land. And so begins a most unique spin on what giant monster movies need to be.

Yesterday morning I caught a SXSW press screening of Hubble 3D at the Bob Bullock Museum's IMAX theater. Shot in part on a specially designed, 700-pound, space-ready IMAX 3D camera, the movie tells the telescope's life story, from construction and launch 20 years ago through the five subsequent servicing missions.

The primary focus of the film is the Space Shuttle Atlantis' May 2009 repair mission, the last-scheduled trip of its kind. Although not mentioned during the movie, one of the things the Atlantis crew installed on the Hubble was a device that will eventually cause it to de-orbit, making way for its successor, the James Webb Telescope.

(I consider myself a pretty serious movie fan. But the simple fact of the matter is that I miss stuff. Famous and interesting stuff. But not for long! Welcome to the column where I continue my film education before your very eyes. I will seek out and watch all of the movies I know I should have seen by now. I will first "review" the movie before I've watched it, based entirely on its reputation. Then I will give the movie a fair chance and actually watch it. You will laugh at me, you may condemn me, but you will never say I didn't try!)

The Film:



Starring:

Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner and Cindy Morgan

Why I Haven't Seen It Until Now:

I grew up on a steady diet of Indiana Jones, James Bond and Marty McFly. 1980s live-action Disney films couldn't have felt less appealing to a kid like me.

Pre-Viewing:

Tron is a fascinating but tremendously dated and ultimately boring film that hit a specific generation at the exact right moment to have a lasting impact. Like The Goonies, this is a film that coasts on nostalgia and rose-tinted childhood memories and those who loved it as children have yet to realize just how bad it really is.

Jeff Bridges stars as an adventurous computer programmer who enters the computer world known as TRON, where he engages in a bunch of lame video game challenges, culminating in the famous light cycle sequence. There is little plot to speak of and what is there feels like filler to connect the various special effects sequences, which may have been impressive in 1982, but are borderline unwatchable today.

Ultimately, I can see how Tron was a major step forward for visual effects, but outside of that, it's an empty, plotless mess with little to offer me and I'm only watching it because the trailer for Tron Legacy looks pretty nifty.

Post-Viewing:

Okay, put those stones down. I was way off.

Until recently I had no idea who Dan Dare was. I didn't grow up as a comics reader, but even if I had, the series began publication in England in 1950, well before I was even born. However, having now discovered it as an adult, it's safe to say that I would have loved as a kid were I, you know, actually alive. And into comics. In England.

That may sound like a lot of ifs, but Dan Dare is the kind of period-specific, pulpy sci-fi that would have fueled imaginations during a time when sending a man to the moon was still a lunatic flight of fancy, a time when traveling across an ocean was still revered as an awesome milestone for humanity, a time when basically all of the ideas in Frank Hampson's creation would have been at their most fantastic. The series focused on the adventures of the titular Dan Dare, the chief pilot for the Interplanet Space Fleet, as he explored the universe with his friends (and sometimes enemies).

The great sci-fi champs Titan Books have just published the latest entry to their hardback collections of Dan Dare comics, titled Safari in Space, which encompasses both the title volume and the Terra Nova runs from 1959. But don't worry if you're unfamiliar with the character, as I wise, because these library editions of the comics include not only easily digestible character biographies, but extensive background material to give the comics context in the scope of the series' nearly two-decade long publication.

It's hard to watch television these days without being hammered with ads for the second installment in BioWare's space-loving, alien-sexing, sci-fi action-RPG series, Mass Effect. In fact, one of the most striking things about Mass Effect 2 is how/why Electronic Arts is standing so heavily behind it. The advertising campaign has been relentless, blanketing a number of different networks and demographics. Having now finished the game, it's clear why.

Mass Effect 2 transcends genre expectations. It's not just a cut-and-dry role-playing-game with a sci-fi skin to it. If you want it to be a third-person shooter, it's a third person shooter. If you want it to be a team-oriented, tactical RPG, it can be that, too. If you want it to be a story-driven continuation of ME1's adventure to save a universe on the precipice of decimation at the hands of an alien race, well, it's that as well. Indeed the most ambitious aspect of ME2 is how malleable its various play-styles can be while still falling under the umbrella of dense science fiction filled with meaningful relationships and storylines.

That ambition, however, is also its weak spot. In an attempt to make a product that could be marketed to a bigger swath of gamers, BioWare inadvertently lost sight of what made the first Mass Effect a resounding triumph; mainly that it was a totally geeked out RPG that played perfectly to the customize-everything wants of RPG players. ME2, on the other hand, is a bit more linear in its attempt to appeal beyond the RPG consumer base.

Greetings fellow cinephiles, Brian Salisbury of Horror Squad here; Sci-Fi Squad's twisted sibling. Over on our side of the blogosphere, I operate a weekly feature focusing on horror movies on VHS that never graduated to DVD or are no longer readily available as such. It's called Terror Tapes and it has sent me wading waist-deep through some of the worst garbage the local Austin video stores have to offer. There have been a smattering of gems among the waste, but for the most part these films emphatically argue against their own upgrade.

I received a film for Christmas that I have desperately wanted to see ever since saw the cover art on the rental shelf when I was younger. It was called Split Second and featured an alarmingly nonchalant Rutger Hauer strolling casually away from a badass alien monster. Once the DVD went out of print a few years ago, tracking it down became a bit arduous. Thank goodness for dead formats!

So, I thought I would do a special Sci-Fi Squad edition of Terror Tapes as Split Second certainly seems to fall under that banner far more than horror. Enjoy!

(This review originally appeared onTV Squad. Battlestar Galactica: The Plan airs Sunday at 9 p.m/8 p.m. Central on Syfy.)

Leoben, that tricky toaster, was right: All of this has happened before, and all of it is happening again.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan retells major events from the first two years of the celebrated sci-fi series through the eyes of the Cylons. It weaves together recycled scenes from the series with new footage to reveal a first-hand account of the Cylon agenda, or "plan."

The result is a film that feels incomplete, episodic and disjointed. It plays less like a movie and largely like a disk full of high quality bonus material. Most of what happens here feels irrelevant to the series -- almost like it was tacked on to the BSG mythos to satisfy completists and hardcore fans. Still, it's worth watching to see Dean Stockwell carry the film with a fearless performance as the scheming and duplicitous Brother Cavil. The veteran character actor takes center stage in The Plan, and your enjoyment of the film will rest largely on how much you like, or dislike, Cavil and his major role in the series.

Stockwell's performance isn't the only thing worth recommending here. The Plan fleshes out a few of the series' more compelling stories, and it makes room for a new one involving Simon (Rock Worthy), aka Cylon Number Four. Worthy is terrific as a Four living with a human family and torn between his human life and his duty as a Cylon. Cylons learning to love other humans and to cherish their own humanity is a repeating theme in The Plan.

The buzz and buzzkill leading up to Avatar, it turns out, found inadequate purchase now that the world has finally glimpsed the fabled film. The echo chamber of hype that believed it would drastically alter the landscape of filmmaking forever, the virulent, vitriolic cries of Dances with Smurfs, the total indifference...all misplaced.

You are not prepared for Avatar. Roll your eyes at that; laugh it off, you've heard that pitch before. It's not hyperbole, though, it's bald truth. Whether it's your most anticipated movie of the year or your least, it is not precisely what you think it is. How could it be? Avatar is a motion picture precedent, after all. It's fair to say that the core conflict is less than revolutionary and that parts of the narrative are broad, but those ills are scarcely symptomatic of James Cameron's ultimate goal. It's not about challenging the formula of Group X oppresses Group Y, who then fight back. Nor is it about only showcasing the bleeding edge technology that Cameron and company have invented and licensed over the last decade. Avatar is about transporting a viewer to the awe-inspiring alien world of Pandora and integrating them into its fantastic way of life for 150 minutes. That's the bullseye Cameron is aiming for, and that is the bullseye he obliterates.

By Todd Gilchrist (reprint from 10/28/09 -- L.A. Screamfest)

I'm not sure exactly what quality it is that real people possess and actors lack, but any time a film pretends to document real behavior, either literally or as a reenactment, something is almost always missing. Sometimes the problem is a deliberate decision to enhance events with artificial emphasis or drama, and sometimes it's simply too great a sense of self-awareness in the actor, who knows he or she is performing. But while there are a precious few movies that nail that authenticity, notably the recent underdog-blockbuster Paranormal Activity, such is certainly the case in The Fourth Kind, a film that purports to build an argument for alien abductions using "actual" footage from case studies.

While much of the movie's so-called source material carries the convincing roughness and deficiencies of homemade, handheld recording, too much of it seems far too calculated, both in its technical proficiency and the performances contributed by its "real" people. Further, its accompanying reenactments by recognizable actors undermine the possibility that audiences can take its case seriously, all of which adds up to thriller that unravels easily even if it nevertheless occasionally qualifies as a scary good time.