Sci-Fi

dir: Andrew Stanton

2026

It’s kind of miraculous that they still let Andrew Stanton make movies, especially in this day and age where moviemaking is seen as a dying, legacy art form, akin to opera and ballet, don’t you know. In the past if you made a flick that massively bombed and lost a studio a massive amount of money they rarely if ever allowed you to make a movie again.

Stanton directed Finding Nemo, and WALL-E, which I’m sure did very well in the era when all Pixar movies did very well, but then they let him make John Carter, which, adjusted for inflation lost more money than any other flick ever, even more than Pluto Nash or Wild Wild West or almost every release since the covid era that hasn’t made its money back. And yet the dream factory hasn’t slowed down at all…

The truth is, a lot of it is bullshit. As per Hollywood accounting, even successful movies don’t make a cent because the studios don’t want to pay taxes or residuals, so it’s all a smokescreen to allow money to keep pouring into a black hole of neediness, with almost nothing coming out of it except memes and cute visuals.

All the same, the sheer scale of John Carter’s floppiness has been a joke haunting Stanton’s career ever since then. Disney clearly still loves him, though, because they let him direct humans again here in a curious science fiction flick before they let him direct Toy Story 5.

In the Blink of an Eye seems ambitious, in that it pretends it’s telling three interlinked stories set in three distinct and distant time periods that seek to embody aspects of our (collective, human) past, present and future. It isn’t really that ‘big’ or complicated. When I was watching this, I mostly felt glad I was watching a science fiction flick that didn’t degenerate into contrived conflict and action for the sake of action when it trusted the story it was telling to be told in a fairly standard way.

But that’s another reason why I think not that many people are going to catch this on the streaming services (on Hulu if you’re taking notes).

Forty five thousand years ago, there are these people, who happen to be Neanderthals, and they basically live at the mercy of nature and whatever fate befalls them. They find food, they fuck, and the next generation comes along. Just like us in the present.

In the present, a couple very decisively don’t fuck, with the main character in this section kicking out the guy she’s brought home, pointedly reaching for her trusty device to see the job done properly. She happens to be an academic archaeologist, trying to figure out what she’s just pried out of the fossilised grasp of a Neanderthal skeleton.

dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

2025

People believe some crazy shit these days… I mean, people believed a heap of stuff that wasn’t true in the past, but it takes real effort, real commitment to believe patently untrue things these days.

I mean, being a flat earther 500 years ago was the default. Believing it now, well, that takes wilful blind ignorance.

If you tell me a theory that aliens from the Andromeda galaxy are on Earth for no better reason than to kill the bees, I’m going to say “okay, thanks for sharing” and then back away slowly with my hands up in a gesture meant to convey “everyone stay chill” .

But then if you’re Teddy (Jesse Plemons), and you’ve struck upon this theory as the explanation for why everything has gone wrong in your life, and this is the latest theory out of hundreds of conspiracy theories that you’ve come to believe, you’re going to cling to it bitterly, for dear life, to the exclusion of all else.

But it’s not enough to know the truth – you need to convince at least one other person that it’s true as well, otherwise you’re just a solo loon. So Teddy has to enlist his younger autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help in his two-person struggle against intergalactic forces.

Surely these two fuckheads will save us all?

The target of their ire is the CEO of a company that Teddy happens to work for, and she, played by Emma Stone, doesn’t do herself any favours, since she’s a CEO, and we know they’re all evil even if they’re not from another galaxy.

dir: Joachim Rønning

2025

I mean, three strikes, you’re out, surely?

The original Tron is not some beloved 80s sci fi flick; you couldn’t even say it’s a cult classic. It’s on the level of the mostly forgotten Disney stuff from ages ago like The Shaggy D.A. about a human cursed to be a dog, or, even worse, a dog cursed to be a human, or Hervey the Love Bug. It’s stuff that exists but no-one really cares about it. It’s not some rich resource to keep mining, to warrant continuing to return to the well.

Tron was and still is a pretty silly film about a guy who gets sucked into a computer and discovers a funky world where people fling these disks at each other and ride on light cycles. Lots of strong colours, and the ‘real’ world being replicated in the electronic world with easily vanquished bad guys and lots of blue neon everywhere.

Blue means ‘good’, red means ‘evil’.

Jeff Bridges played a guy who gets sucked into the computer world. He’s not even the main character. Tron is. It’s in the name, Tron’s the hero, played by the great Bruce Boxleitner. Now that’s a name you don’t hear often enough.

Anyway, it was a pretty cheesy kids movie. I was a kid. I liked cheese. I watched a copy of Tron taped off of the telly squillions of times, and then I presumably got bored of it. It holds no special place in my nerdy heart.

And then for some baffling reason they made a sequel called Tron Legacy in 2010, which is a terrible, terrible movie with great visuals, a banging soundtrack and nothing but terrible narrative and acting choices.

It didn’t do that well. More people got the soundtrack (by which I mean illegally downloaded) because it was great, and by Daft Punk, and not because they liked the movie.

The script, the dialogue? It was terrible, like, genuinely terrible. There’s an actual line of dialogue where Jeff Bridges says “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!”

dir: Fleur Fortuné

2025

At this stage, I think it has become redundant to say things like “this new sci fi film is set in a dystopian future”, because when I look at the sci fi flicks I’ve watched in the last couple of years, the last one that wasn’t set in a bleak, dystopian future was… no idea. Maybe After Yang, that was the least bleak. None of them foretell a future that isn’t grim, where there aren’t vast wastelands or forbidden zones everywhere, where the world isn’t scarred by climate change related disasters. They’re not all Mad Max, but they’re not far off.

So, yes, in this latest film that I watched, called The Assessment, terrible things have happened to the world, but a select few live in some domed place somehow exempt from the ravages of anthropomorphic climate change. These select few live elongated lives, but are forbidden from procreating naturally (the same drug that gives them longevity prevents them from being fertile). In order to have a child, ex-vitro being the term, they have to apply to the regime in control, and be assessed by an assessor, hence the title.

Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are the couple that want a baby, and Virginia (Alicia Vikander) is the assessor. She will make their lives a living hell for the next 7 days, under the guise of testing their suitability as parents.

She’s from The Government, you see, so everything she does must be for the greater good, surely?

The couple live near the ocean, in an incredibly expensive looking place. I guess not all apocalypses are equal. They seem to be doing okay, but I guess they’re bored, so they think a child will save their relationship.

Reference is often made to the “Old World”, as a terrible place where people are sent as a punishment or because they’re poor. Mia’s mother, we are told over and over, was exiled to the Old World to punish her presumably for telling the truth about something, like what a terrible regime is in power ruling over their lives with petty, persistent drudgery.

Probably fascist, probably voted for by a majority of voters, who knows. They probably campaigned on “We’ll make your lives a living hell, but at least we hate refugees more” and won in a landslide.