Posts Tagged ‘science fiction’

The Planet of the Apes franchise isn’t one of my personal science fiction classics – I always found the actors in ape costumes distracted me.  I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see this addition to the series like X-Men First Class though this proved to be well worth the price of admission.  However I’m glad I did because the CG apes are really good and several of the motion capture performances are exceptional.

When the credits roll don’t get up to leave because almost immediately the film starts again.

The film is very much a morality tale with acts of violence, anger, fear, greed,  hatred, love and kindness along the road to the doom of humanity and the rise of the apes.  Although it made for simple story telling one minor character accidentally is responsible for much of humanities doom which did feel a little contrived.

James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Tom Felton and David Oyelowo are all excellent.  I almost expect more from Brian Cox who played his part well but didn’t seem to have a huge amount to work with.

The real stars though have to be the CG apes and the performances by the actors who played them.  There has been a fair amount of coverage of Andy Serkis’ central performance as Casear but many of the other apes have smaller parts but are equally well acted.  Those performance include real emotional depth and have character arcs that are better developed than many of the human characters.

The CG itself is outstanding especially given the huge number of CG shots in the film.  There were a few slightly dodgy shots where they tried just a bit too hard but they were hardly on a par with the dubious CG man running on collapsing crane of last year’s film of  The A-Team.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is another fun summer movie that probably just misses out on being a true classic despite the exceptional performances of the apes.

Just watched the latest Doctor Who – The Curse of the Black Spot.  Very much in the monster of the week / concept based science fiction mixed up with pirates.  In theory it had all the elements to be a really good episode.  Unfortunately somewhere along the way something got lost.  I don’t think the problem was that comparing it to Pirates of the Caribbean.  The becalmed pirate ship set up let them get away with a story that was in a nice, self-contained location.  Maybe they were so busy ticking pirate story boxes they lost the spirit of the pirate story?  I expected the pirates themselves to be both bad and scary in their own right but they’d be reduced to paper cut fearing, backboneless jellies who didn’t really come across as having been very naughty let alone worthy of the hangman’s rope.

The twist of the siren turning out to be a spaceship’s automated medical system trying to save the humans was a nice idea.

There were a couple of nods to The Day of the Moon and The Impossible Astronaut.  They felt a little bit heavy-handed in the way they were included as though someone felt we had to be reminded there is an ongoing plot this series in case we might forget.

So personally I felt The Curse of the Black Spot wasn’t a bad Doctor Who but it wasn’t a great one either.

Limitless is an old school Science Fiction Action thriller with a modern setting. The basic premise comes straight from the pre-Dune / Stranger in a Strange Land territory of SF that explores the impact of a single, new technology on the characters.

The intriguing idea at Limitless’ core is a drug that makes someone smarter and more focused. I’ve read a couple of reviews that point out the film for falling back on urban myths about using the unused parts of the brain. However this fake neuroscience is only ever spouted by a dealer not a scientist so he could have been talking rubbish to sell a product he doesn’t understand.

Bradley Cooper is Eddie Morra. The film relies on a first person narrative, with Morra narrating some events, so Cooper is in pretty much every scene. If he wasn’t good the film would be a disaster. Thankfully he’s on good form. He transforms his character several times during the film from underperformer to genius to suffering side effects to withdrawal and so on. The film only breaks out of the first person perspective for one scene to allow Morra’s girlfriend to be threatened and experience the drug .

Robert De Niro as Carl Van Loon is good. Thankfully there isn’t a hint of ham in his performance. Saddly there just wasn’t enough of his character in the film.

The film’s pacing is a bit patchy with some of the stages of Eddie Morra raced through without really being explored. In particular the ending was weakened by suddenly jumping forwards to face down De Niro who should be the heavy weight villain and not the Andrew Howard’s nasty loan shark -Gennady. If he’d been neutralized sooner Van Loon could have developed into a far more interesting threat.

There are some points where the plot forces you to accept coincidence or that the hero after taking the drug isn’t as smart as he’s supposed to have become. For example why doesn’t he pay off his loan to the nasty loan shark as soon as he can or spot that the businessman who suddenly rose to power and prominence is on the same drug he is? Based on the numbers we’re given he was making money fast enough that he didn’t really need to go to the loan shark he just needed a few more days of being patient.

The effects are a bit patchy. They are largely to create drug related effects and to try to interpret in a rather literal way the impact of the drug on Eddie’s though process. The tone is also a bit uneven. During the climax it goes from suspense to horror at the hero drinking drug tainted blood to treating blinding a one eyed villain as comedy in the vein of early Bond villain’s meeting their end.

Personally I thought Limitless was a good but not great film.

Source Code is a very specific kind of Science Fiction that toys with a single concept like a cat toying with it’s pray. That concept becomes what that the whole story is built around. It’s the nature this kind of Science Fiction that it is often more about a piece of technology or a plot than about characters. In this case it is the plot and two mysteries that is the focus. Hopefully you’ve already seen the trailer so I don’t need to explain that (I’ve posted it above if you haven’t). Each time we go through the eight minutes before the attack again more parts of the mysteries is revealed. Each time we jump back to the real world some parts of the mysteries are revealed. Until we get to the end of the ride after 93 minutes.

The concept at the core of Source Code’s plot is a loop in time of sorts in which one person assumes another person’s identity for a short period of time before a disastrous event. It would be easy to point to Ground Hog Day with Phil’s romance with Rita; or if you prefer to focus on the occupying someone else’s life trying to put something right its Quantum Leap; or a military project using short-term time travel to fix something that’s gone wrong Seven Days; and anyone who watched Star Trek: The Next Generation could easily point to the episode Cause and Effect with the Enterprise blowing up repeatedly after a sequence of events. If this was a film without its own twists and play on the idea that would be fair but fortunately this film is its own take on those ideas.

The characters are nicely acted within the confines the structure gives them to develop but inevitably they are largely stereotypes: so inside the source code we have an air force pilot, a stand up comedian with a drink problem, a non descript terrorist and other passenger while outside we have the Bureaucratic Scientist, the military superior and the boffin who operates the machine. At least once the hero details off the Christina’s main characteristics he has identified in his various runs through their eight minutes together.

The plot relies on a series of twists and the parallel plots in the Source Code world and Real World to keep the tension level up. I have to congratulate the trailer makers because it would have been very easy to give away the first twist in the trailer. It would also have been quite easy to lose the films pace in an explanation of how time travel really worked – a few lines of appropriate technobable cover up that crack and leave it to the audience to fill in the blanks if they care. If this was British Science Fiction I’d predict a more down beat twist for the ending. However the ending was still satisfying. I’m pretty certain it was foreshadowed earlier in the film but I’d have to watch it again to be sure.

The effects, action sequences and stunt work are all solid. I can’t honestly remember anything about the soundtrack although I’m sure there was one solidly contributing to the film.

Ultimately Source Code is a good, solid movie in all departments although I’m not sure how much rewatch value it will have on DVD.

Just back from seeing Monsters at FACT in Liverpool followed by an excellent meal at Tapas Tapas.

Monsters is a science fiction, road movie, love story, monster invasion film and I can’t think of a single film to really compare it to.  Six years after giant aliens landed on Earth the South of the US and the North of Mexico is now effectively a war zone and disaster area where the aliens migrate to each year to breed.  The story centres on a photojournalist who has to try and get his paper’s proprietor’s daughter home from Mexico to the USA.

Monsters has been compared to The Blair Witch Project in many reviews I’ve seen.  One of my many favourite quotes from The West Wing is from Leo…

There’s two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make ‘em: laws and sausages.

The reviewers are obsessing about the process of film making process rather than the sausages that have been made.  The problem with that is it’s grossly unfair to Monsters.  If you don’t know how Monsters was made you’d not be able to tell it was a low budget film with script, direction, cinematography, production design and visual effects Gareth Edwards.  You’d also not realise given the number of extras whose performances are entirely naturalistic and believable that it had a cast of just two professional actors.  Monsters is every bit as good as big budget productions with ten or twenty times its budget.  It is entirely its own film and comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are neither helpful or informative.

The story telling is excellent.  First of all the pre-credit sequence neatly sets up the world and gives us a glimpse of the alien.  Rather than teasing us, Alien style, with it through the film we know what our heroes are facing.  Then the story takes us forward six years and along the journey that unfolds shows us the effect of the aliens on Mexico and then the southern USA.  Even though in some ways you could argue not a lot happens during the film Monsters builds tension and suspense steadily and effectively right up to the climax.

Monsters is also very clever at how it passes on information to the audience about the world now the aliens have arrived.  A poorer film might have simply dumped all the information out in one big splurge early on and then focused on the main characters attempt to get home or war with the aliens.  Monsters drips out the information a little bit at a time along the way letting us build a picture of the world as we go.

Both the leads are highly watchable and believable.  These are believable characters who make a down to earth science fiction setting entirely believable – even when it’s at its least believable.

The special effects are absolutely excellent and entirely believable.  They don’t attempt to do anything that they can’t achieve.  Many are very cleverly done so rather than planting a big CG effect in our face they are often slightly out of focus, revealed as a quick glimpse of something or largely hidden by the night.  To focus on Edwards’ astonishing work is to ignore the contribution made to the film by the sound and editing teams and the music all of which really help make the film into a rounded production.

I would say that after Inception this is the best film I’ve seen in 2010.  Highly recommended.

Marcus L. Rowland has released the eleventh installment of his excellent, shareware Forgotten Futures RPG: Forgotten Futures XI – Planets of Peril. Its currently available on CD and the download version will be available on 20th December 2010. Forgotten Futures XI is a complete setting based on Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1930s science fiction stories. It includes details of the worlds, asteroids and major moons of the setting. There is a detailed adventure campaign, three long adventures and eighteen adventure outlines to help referees get their game up and running.

Update: Marcus is having some problems updating the FF website so he’s set up a temporary Forgotten Futures site.

Ragnarok Issue 57 (The Magazine of the Society of Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargaming) landed through my letter box today.  My article for BTRC’s SLAG! appears along with a variety of fantasy and science fiction wargaming goodness.

In the dim and distant past (well circa 1996), when I had my first web site on mudhole, I had some pages about SLA Industries a British, dystopian, science fiction, table top role-playing game.  Last night I revived some of those pages from back-ups.  So for the first time in quite awhile (well probably 8 or 9 years) some of my completely unofficial, fan material is back.  More to follow later.

The latest issues of Ragnarok (The Magazine of the Society of Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargaming) arrived by post today. An interesting mix of articles including Daleks, Zombies, SF Armoured warfare, Fantasy Naval and Luna Exploration alongside the regular rules and miniature reviews.

My article, The Panzerfauste Song Book, takes up more pages than I thought it would. If I’d realised how long it is I’d have split it in two!

The SFSFW’s been busy on the WWW today launching the SFSFW blog and SFSFW twitter to go along with the existing SFSFW web site and SFSFW Facebook page.