Sci-Fi

dir: James Gunn

2023

Sometimes, the fact that things can end, and end well, is of more comfort than the idea that something could go on endlessly forever.

The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have long been a weirder, stranger and funnier corner of the Marvel Industrial Complex’s movie output, and with this last hurrah for director James Gunn, they can wander off into the sunset of some other star system on good terms, with each other and with us, the drooling, flipper-slapping-together seals in the audience.

The main reason Gunn is unlikely to make any more of these is that now that he’s one of the CEOs at DC Films, it probably wouldn’t be considered kosher to make films for the enemy. Some agglomeration of spineless executives has decided that if they install Gunn in some important position that it will somehow resurrect the studio’s dismal fortunes so that not all their movies without “Batman” in the title keep bombing.

Whatever it ultimately means, or results in, at least Gunn can say that he’s worked in both comic-book ponds, and made flicks in either capacity that are stamped with his oddball sensibilities and personal hobbyhorses, that definitely weren’t just uniform, undifferentiated products extruded by “The System”.

Which is more than you can say about the last bunch of Marvel movies post-Endgame before this one. It’s nice that this one stands alone, for once.

Guardians 3 starts with Rocket singing along with Radiohead’s Creep as he wanders around one of the main thoroughfares in Knowhere: a cobbled together community housed with the head of a dead Celestial. I don’t know what any of that means either, I’m just a dumbed down AI that jumbles words together like they’re lego bricks, hoping things will work out.

Everyone is putting things in their right place, making everything perfect, just before a flying golden statue flies in and starts beating the shit out of everyone, including Rocket, who is mortally wounded in the fighting.

During this “re-introduction” sequence where each of the returning characters gets their moment, Peter “Star-Lord” Quill (Chris Pratt) is shown to be a total drunk, unable to recover from having lost the love of his life Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in one of the earlier movies, but provoked to confused outpourings due to the fact that a Gamora from an earlier timeline currently exists in their universe; a Gamora who’s had nothing to do with Quill or the other Guardians, and who has never reconciled with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillen).

These Guardians are strangers to her, so she has no reason to even tolerate Quill, let alone give a damn what happens to the rest of them in the hi-jinks that ensue.

dir: George Johnstone

2023

What to say about another flick about a killer doll. Wait, are there others?

Well, I guess it’s not a massive genre or subgenre of horror. And it’s probably not really a horror flick, although a few horrible things happen.

It’s definitely sci-fi, because a new “thing” is created and, upon gaining sentience or something close to self-awareness, it almost immediately starts killing people. It’s like these people have never seen a movie before.

Or ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

I guess when it’s a thriller where a ‘something’ that’s meant to be inanimate gains some kind of ‘life’ and starts going after people, does it really make a difference whether the doll in question is possessed by an evil spirit, the soul of a serial killer or an AI?

Well, it does make a tiny bit of difference. Some people have long argued that the point of The Exorcist was that Regan, the poor child possessed by a demon, only becomes so because her mother, played by the great Ellen Burstyn, was a bad mother.

It’s a terrible, sexist, misogynist argument, but hey, after all, there are a lot of Catholics in that story, so what else would you expect?

No, what I’m getting at is that the fear they’re tapping into is not that dolls could come to life and kill us all, but that our own shittiness as parents harms kids and even harms experimental androids, turning them into kill crazy psychopaths.

dir: David Cronenberg

2022

Who feels like an ungrateful piece of shit? I feel like an ungrateful piece of shit!

What kind of churl doesn’t appreciate a new film coming out from Canadian grandmaster director David Cronenberg? He’s been making great, GREAT films for like nearly 50 years!

I’m not even going to list them. Don’t even look them up. If you know, you know.

Anyway, just to short circuit a preamble that could run for pages, I did not like this fucking film. At all.

And I don’t feel great about it. I am sure the problem is me, and not any part of the film. I don’t like seeing scenes of surgery in this, the real current world that we live in, which only seems fictional some of the time.

In fact, I loathe seeing scenes of surgery. A lot of this film is surgery as performance art, as seduction, as something to do when you’re bored or curious, so even though there aren’t “real” scenes of surgery, and I realise it’s all latex and practical effects and such, fuck that, and ewww.

I mean, after all, what did I expect? This is Cronenberg. He didn’t invent “body horror”, but he perfected its cinematic realisation. This is his fucking bread and butter. To have wanted or expected anything else is a form of unproductive madness.

I don’t know why this seems like it was definitely shot in Greece, definitely during one of the pandemic lockdowns, but it was. Neither Greece nor the pandemic play any part in the story, seeing as it’s set in the future, but it’s hard not to laugh at some of the stuff that happens and wonder if it’s a stylistic choice or a covid protocol.

Viggo Mortensen, whatever my complaints with the flick, does not put in a bad performance. He’s not capable of it. I can’t remember the last time I saw him be less than great in anything he was in, and it’s not about to goddamn happen now, not even in a shitty, ill-considered film overflowing with sci-fi bollocks.

Viggo (yes, we are on a first name basis, thanks for asking) plays a chap called Saul Tenser. Saul, like many people in this future hellscape, is afflicted with a body that spontaneously creates new organs. It is a painful process, but, after all, artists are said to have to suffer for their art.

In this cowardly, old future world, humans have changed. Not because of genetic engineering or choice, or anything. But possibly because of what they’ve done to the environment. People don’t feel pain anymore, in the sense that they don’t feel pain in their skin or limbs (I guess? I never really completely understood this aspect), and they have new organs popping up. Saul and his fellow performer Caprice (Lea Seydoux) perform surgeries (on him) for audiences where these new organs are extracted and displayed for all to see.

dir: Kristina Buožytė & Bruno Samper

2022

Vesper. It means evening in Latin, and it’s the first name of the main character here.

It’s the evening of the world, or at least that of humanity. Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there aren’t many humans around and most of them aren’t well. Animals are gone, and plant life is abundant, but it’s mutated, and it doesn’t like to be eaten. In fact in a lot of cases it likes to fight back.

I don’t know how many people are left, but out in the wastelands, there’s 13-year-old Vesper (Raffiella Chapman), her paralysed dad (Richard Brake) who can still communicate with her through a floating drone that looks suspiciously like Wilson the volleyball, her vicious uncle Jonas (Eddie Marsen) and his coterie of cruel, in some cases deformed, kids. He also has genetically engineered humanoid slaves they call jugs. Very disturbing. “They” don’t consider them human, but they’re as human as the other scum oppressing and using them.

Vesper spends all her time looking for viable plants or seeds for food and / or looking after her father’s body, which requires bioenergy power sources. She knows her way around the decrepit world they inhabit, with her father’s voice often barking at her to be constantly vigilant to threats.

The opening titles make reference to genetic engineering, which humanity thought would save them from ecological disaster, actually causing the disaster itself, but in Vesper’s hands her strange form of biohacking or gene manipulation gives her a chance to do stuff that everyone else tells her she shouldn’t do.