Sci-Fi

Disclosure Day

It's the bird's fault, I tell you

dir: Spielbergo

2026

Ugh. To be so foolish as to think that I was to be made happy by a Spielbergo film this late in the game…

Perhaps the problem with late stage Spielberg is the same problem with late stage capitalism – it just doesn’t deliver any of the stuff it promised it would bring, and basically threatens us with “well, what else are you going to do, anyway, fuckheads? Amuse yourselves, somehow?”

At this stage you could think no other director has devoted as much of his career to stories about aliens as Spielberg has with as much success, and you’d probably be right. Though we forget, because he’s made so many films that don’t have aliens, that he is the premiere imaginer of what those interactions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ would look like, could look like, should look like.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn’t his first flick, but it did begin his very memorable love affair with all things alien which at the time seemed novel: a view of alien life that wasn’t automatically a threat to humanity, that still conformed with the general concepts of mid-20th century UFO sci-fi ideas in the popular consciousness. E.T. the Extra-terrestrial further cemented the idea that if there be aliens, they might be hideous/cute weirdoes that like candy and just want to hang out before phoning home, and that they didn’t necessarily bear us any ill-will.

Sure, War of the Worlds had Martians killing as many people as they could as revenge for, I dunno, polluting their planet with radioactive robots or some such, but that didn’t represent a break up or anything: that was the part of a long term relationship where someone’s grown bored with their partner, and maybe thinks about fucking around or roleplaying just to feel alive again.

Disclosure Day, to a baffling purpose, returns him to more familiar ground reassuring us, the great unwashed, that if aliens exist, they’re still not a threat to us.

But we remain a threat to them and to each other. In fact, the premise here relies on reasserting familiar tropes about aliens all over again: Roswell actually did happen, aliens have been crashing their flying saucers onto our planet and abducting people and presumably probing them for decades, and that there are quasi-government goons tasked with keeping this knowledge out of the public’s hands.

Just like all the dumbest conspiracy theorists always said!

Rating:

5 stars

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Soulm8te

Don't try that "girl power" shit on me

dir: Kate Dolan

2026

I’ll be honest with you: Every time I review a movie that has a word in its title that has a number within it, it hurts. It hurts me deeply, in my core. I can joke about it, because I’m a trooper, someone who soldiers on regardless, but it really does carve off a section of my soul whenever I do it.

I loathe the practice to an admittedly unhinged degree. Other people are like “whatever” about it or roll their eyes, seeing it as innocuous as vanity number plates, but to me it’s another signal that society not only is deeply corrupted but large parts of if need to be cauterised in order to save the rest.

It didn’t start with M3GAN, but worst of all it didn’t end there either. The concept of a computer based whatever also going crazy and trying to kill people after falling in love with them is as old as the hills. How old are the hills? Oh, at least a few thousand years old, according to the Creationists.

M3GAN also represented the resurgence in the murder bot genre that perhaps spoke to deeper fears within the audience, not just of the ‘bad seed’ variety, but of our fear that we, the audience, are weak, and we, as the audience, are just as corruptible, as vulnerable as our protagonists.

Soulm8te *ugh* taps in to at least two contemporary tech-based fears, which are “what happens when we confuse our conversations with AI-bots with actual relationships?” and “what happens after you have sex with a sex bot?” The first connects to the second, but we’ve seen so many variations of these concepts that a new movie has to either differentiate itself with an intelligent and novel take on these hot takes, or degenerate into a stupid gory shlockfest.

Guess which path they take with this flick?

I’ll give you a hint: if you were expecting a film like Her, or Ex Machina, you’re in the wrong theatre. Back in the day a flick like this would have played in the type of cinema that had sticky seats and even stickier floors, so it’s not even pretending to be art house fare or anything that’s trying to be remotely cerebral.

Rating:

4 stars

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The Mandalorian and Grogu

More cheese please on this cheese pizza of a movie

dir: Jon Favreau

2026

The titles of films are often baffling, but could you imagine trying to explain the title of this flick, a Star Wars to, say, a non-English speaking immigrant in their 70s? For some reason I’ve become fixated on an imaginary conversation in my head that could never happen these days since my sainted mother has passed on from this mortal coil:

“Son, what did you do this weekend?”
- “Well, Mother dearest, I went to a cinema and watched a movie.”
“Praytell, what was the movie called?”
- “Err, um, it was called The Mandalorian and Grogu
“What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck are those things, individually and then put together in that sentence?”
- “Mum, they’re made up sci fi bullshit.”
“Oh, okay then, sorry I asked. I just wanted to know what my son has been up to and if he’s been all right and instead I get passive-aggressive nonsense and salty talk. I cannot abide salty talk.”
- “I’m sorry mum, please forgive me. Here, have ten thousand flowers to make up for it.”
“It’s barely enough.”
- “I know let me try harder…”

Okay, so that was self-indulgent twaddle, but, hey, when you lose your mother, then you can tell me what the appropriate way to honour her is. First things first, she would never have sworn like that, but secondly, however prone to exaggeration I might be, if I’d said the words The Mandalorian and Grogu to her face she probably would have slapped me, and with good reason.

To be fair I would never have been able to explain Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to her either, mostly because I think all of us only ever pretended to know what it meant.

The thing about Star Wars that I think all of us are starting to appreciate, with a certain amount of creeping dread, is that the ‘thing’ that George Lucas and a whole bunch of other people created, everything and everywhere that it was cobbled together from, it as an entity can only ever look backwards. The one thing they’ll never do is stop looking backwards. A new film that comes out this year is set in the past. Does that make any sense? Something supposedly set in a far distant future / past in a far flung galaxy has to always, always, always be set in the late 70s, early 80s.

Entirely independent of anything to do with a story or plot, I was fascinated to watch long sections of this flick set on… a moon of a planet named after Shakira, who, presumably in this universe is rich enough to own her own star systems. And the setting of this planet that our hero walks around in has sets that pretty much look identical to Blade Runner from forty years ago. Don’t get me wrong, it looked fine, it’s just that, for whatever reasons, and I’m sure there’s lots of them, it looked deliberately like the past’s idea of what the future might look like circa 1985.

Rating:

6 stars

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Project Hail Mary

I would have gone with "Project Not a Hope in Hell"

dirs.: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

2026

I haven’t read the book, but I hear it’s a good read, if you’re into that kind of thing. I feel like, perhaps unfairly, Andy Weir’s books are for people who like easily digestible science fiction where something exciting happens at the end of every chapter, and every chapter is only a page and a half.

Probably not true, but we all have our biases. Based on this unfounded set of assumptions, I think that could be one of the reasons why his books translate into flicks so easily. The Martian was hard to hate even if it mostly had one person, being Matt Damon, Matt Damoning his way across Mars and jabbering at us in voiceover for over two and a half hours.

Project Hail Mary similarly has mostly one person on screen for most of its length, with a bunch of flashbacks to Earth, but has the added bonus of a cute alien friend for our main character to chat with.

Also unlike The Martian, while the flick might rest on the shoulders of a scientist type doing science-y things in order to survive (with a confident and calm manner), this time around our main character may be science smart, but he’s a raging, cowardly doofus who bangs around like a pinball in order to make us laugh. The makers really lean in on that shit.

When you’re thinking of someone playing the lead in one of these kinds of flicks, Ryan Gosling wouldn’t usually be where your mind would go. Sure, he can play stoic robots, and dead-eyed psychopaths, but a role like this needs someone who can express stuff. He’s the guy you get when you need a white guy to save jazz, but not usually the one you want to save the world.

Gosling cries multiple times in this movie. I just want to reassure potential audiences, he mostly acts humanly and humanely in this movie, and is not like a glum robot like in most of his roles.

He plays someone whose surname is Grace, so they call him Grace for most of the movie, despite the fact that he has a first name, you know. Ryland. Anyway, this jerk wakes up on a spaceship with a beard and long hair. He has no idea how he got there and doesn’t really know why he’s there. He slowly pieces it together, that he’s on some mission to save the Earth.

Rating:

8 stars

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In the Blink of an Eye

Blink your eyes and it's all gone

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.

Rating:

8 stars

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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Just don't do anything

dir: Gore Verbinski

2026

Rarely have I started watching a film and enjoyed it initially, and then had that enjoyment plummet so quickly and completely, as with this fucking flick.

I literally gasped at how rapidly it went terrible, but part of me wonders whether that was the actual point?

To anyone who’s watched movies over the last 40 years or so, almost every element of the film will be familiar, but its point isn’t just to plunder the back catalogue: it’s to make a heartfelt plea to the audience to not pre-emptively embrace AI in all its vile glory.

They know it’s a losing battle, because social media is too seductive and the average consumer (ie. American) is too lazy and thoughtless to see the techno-apocalypse that they are ushering in to existence. And the makers and extruders of entertainment products want to save time and money by not paying people and instead engaging slop generators to generate slop.

So maybe that’s why it’s not a coincidence that this script and many of the visuals feel like they were generated by a soulless sequence of algorithms and prompts that ‘borrowed’ all that it could from a myriad of other, better movies.

As I said earlier, it’s starts off okay. Sam Rockwell, even in something as misguided as this, is always a delight, or at least often a delight, and he delighted me here. Looking like a retro-futurist crazy homeless person (deliberately intended to recall Bruce Willis’ character from 12 Monkeys bursts into a diner called Norm’s, and starts haranguing the other diners. He tells them that he’s from the future, and that he needs the help of a number of them in order to prevent an AI from destroying the world.

Rating:

4 stars

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Bugonia

Poster odd - check; odd fonts used - check.
That's it, don't think we need anything else.

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.

Rating:

6 stars

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Predator: Badlands

I will admit the title isn't great. Alternative titles considered
were "Two and a half Predators", "Thia and Dek Go Large"
and "Pret a Manger & Pret a Porter Present: Pred a tor Four!"

dir: Dan Trachtenberg

2025

This should absolutely not work, and yet somehow it does.

Taking a Predator, and making it the protagonist of a movie seems like insanity. And yet, they go even further, and make it a buddy movie with a synthetic android (Elle Fanning), as they help each other in ways that they couldn’t achieve on their own.

Yes, since I mention synthetics, and I’m about to mention the Weyland Yutani corporation, this does sound worryingly like an Aliens Versus Predator crossover yet again, but it’s not really full throttle. It’s just that the Weyland Yutani stuff is meant to prepare us for a future where corporations are somehow even more evil.

And it also means that, as with every synthetic ever depicted in these films (except for Bishop in Aliens), they always betray the living to serve inhuman ends.

So we know, despite how sunny Thia (Fanning) seems to always be, there’s something coming down the line. Her further job, other than to explain everything, is to gently trick the young Yautja (that’s what the Predators call themselves: I guess it would be weird if they called themselves predators like “hey, Predator, how’s it hanging?”) into being less of an arsehole. In effect, she’s humanising him.

This film is certainly an argument for nurture over nature, in that while the Yautja have been depicted in all the films they’ve been involved in as dudes who live only to kill stuff, and take trophies, in a hyper-aggressive warrior culture in which they have to kill everything around them or risk feeling insecure, it’s never made a whole lot of sense. To somewhat mangle a phrase from Reservoir Dogs, if everyone around you is a kill crazy psychopath, it seems like it would be hard to get shit done. A society, or a civilisation where the only merit is in hunting stuff across the universe, otherwise the people around you kill you for being weak, well, how do you develop and maintain space ships that travel faster than light? Who cleans the bins? Who does the boring logistics stuff? Who looks after the little Yautja when they’re in their in crèches, handing them their first weapons and bandaging their first owies?

Rating:

8 stars

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Tron: Ares

Gravity or bad reviews can't stop me now

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!”

Rating:

6 stars

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The Shrouds

They look like they're watching a David Cronenberg film

dir: David Cronenberg

2024

There is much of The Shrouds that is not baffling. That the director recently lost his wife Carolyn, a (second) marriage that lasted over 40 years, and that it factors into this flick wouldn’t surprise anyone.

This is still a film by the guy whose movies and name are synonymous with the overused term “body horror”. He didn’t invent it but by all the eldritch gods he’s certainly profited from it over the decades.

What is, in truth, more horrible than what actually happens to human bodies when we die? And yet this film, or at least its premise, centres around the idea that there are people so unable to let go of their loved ones that they would pay top dollar to have them buried in a technological marvel of a shroud that allows them, whenever they feel like, to watch their loved one decomposing.

I mean, forgive me if I reach for a bucket, but that’s not something I can stomach or that appeals to me in any way shape or form. And yet it’s something I can understand. The film’s not suggesting that humanity in general craves such a connection to their dead loved ones. But it’s positing the powerful idea that not being able to let go of those we love makes us do some very strange things.

Grief is etc etc. And its vast awfulness or its minute and exquisite tediousness is different for everyone. In David Cronenberg what it conjured up was a desire to make a 10 episode Netflix series where Vincent Cassell, looking a lot like Cronenberg except without the trademark glasses, but with the same shock of silver hair, is completely unable to let go of his wife. And through the magic of technology he can ‘keep’ holding onto her, in his very twisted way, but there is such demand for similar connection from others that he can become a tech overlord of sorts.

Rating:

7 stars

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808 reads

Sci-Fi

Disclosure Day

Soulm8te

The Mandalorian and Grogu

Project Hail Mary

In the Blink of an Eye

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Bugonia

Predator: Badlands

Tron: Ares

The Shrouds

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