Sci-Fi

dir: Russo Brothers

2025

90s nostalgia doesn’t really do much for me. This flick would seem like it’s aiming for 90s nostalgia, in the way that Stranger Things owes much of its existence and probable popularity to 80s nostalgia, and in both cases it just comes across as lazy consumerist grasping.

I guess I remember the 90s well enough to not need to revisit it through some distorted lens. Yes, I get the references, yes I remember a lot of the music and the films. No, I don’t much care for American advertising. And I still don’t think I’ve ever eaten a Twinkie, so I don’t care about them either.

I don’t think the book this was based on by Simon Stålenhag was centred around 90s nostalgia or any deep love of American consumerism. If anything, it’s main intention was to deliver gloomy, somewhat macabre graphics of an American world falling apart because of a slow-rolling apocalypse due to technology. Giant robots, gloomy landscapes, and a population absorbed into a virtual reality environment that leaves their bodies as husks strewn across a landscape traversed by a teenaged girl and a robot.

Humanity is in decline, a hive mind has emerged, and its intentions are less than benevolent. Drones from a war litter the dying landscape. It’s like The Road, but slightly more techie and with less cannibals.

The Russos take that premise and tries to deliver a Steven Spielberg film, without having the grace to craft anything interesting around that desire. They were somehow given the baffling amount of money of $320 million earth dollars to make content for their streamer of choice, being Netflix. All that money, all the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted, and this is what they made.

dir: Fede Alvarez

2024

I have to say I am quite surprised by how entertaining this flick is. I say that because I feel like the two films before it, being Alien: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, I am pretty sure, were made to leach all hope and life from those watching, and to convince us all we’re total fools for expecting anything good to come of any franchise ever again.

That’s a bit harsh. Let me say instead that there were a lot of ideas in those two Ridley Scott directed films that didn’t sit well with me and just annoyed me, more than anything. They felt like an elaboration on themes that felt unnecessary and unwarranted, and I couldn’t imagine the person who cared about any of it who wasn’t Ridley Scott. Whatever it was that made people battling the xenomorphs in the very first two films enjoyable to watch, was entirely absent for me in films that argued that their origins, actually, were because of a bad robot and a race of albinos with a magical evil liquid that kills things or makes them more evil.

This flick perversely situates itself somewhere in what ends up feeling like the past. It’s set some time between Alien and Aliens, I think, with the deliberate aesthetics to match. And as the setting is a space station divided into two halves, one of those halves matches the aesthetics of Alien, so it looks gritty and industrial (with an orange gel / filter to match, in terms of cinematography), and the other half is blueish, and looks a bit shinier (to match some of the look of the James Cameron helmed Aliens.

In a similar manner, bits and pieces across many of the films are picked up and slotted in to areas, kinda like a jumble of Lego plot points, or a Tetris-like melange where the familiar is woven into a newish pattern. Generally, or when done by hacks, this would strike me as lazy filmmaking. But I genuinely think Fede Alvarez and the screenwriter do what they do adeptly, with known / familiar material, in a similarly competent manner like they did with Evil Dead Rise. It’s using established elements well but not slavishly adhering to scenes and shots like too much variance would be blasphemy.

And again, just like in Evil Dead Rise, there is practically no mercy shown to anyone. You think “surely they won’t kill…”, and they’re like “of course we’ll kill them, we’re looking forward to it”.

dir: Wes Ball

2024

The names are getting longer, but that doesn’t mean the films are getting shittier. One day they’ll come out with The Movie about the Book about the TV series about the Unincorporated area adjacent to the Subdivision next to the Hill Below the Mountain Upon Which the Fiefdom of the Dukedom to the Empire of the Planet in the Solar System of the Apes that Talk (they don’t have tails), and people like me will still voluntarily waddle along into the cinemas to watch them. And when buying tickets I’ll just have to say, in between shoveling popcorn down my gullet “the monkey one”, and they’ll know which one I mean, unless there’s a Kong versus or x one in the cinemas concurrently.

I thought the three movies that starred Andy Serkis as Caesar, obviously under layers and layers of digital effects, were absolute aces, real good, better than bad. Genuinely, I thought they were amazing, underpinned as they were by Serkis’ magnificent performance as the lead.

Of course, with the ending of War for the Planet of the Apes, and with this flick jumping about 300 years into the future, one in which apes rule and humans mostly drool, Caesar himself is no more. But his name lives on, and some of his beliefs, and teachings, linger.

At this stage of life on the planet, apes live in their tribes, humans are rarely glimpsed, and if they’re seen at all they’re mostly seen as a nuisance, kind of like foxes or possums. They’re not exactly writing hip-hop musicals or social media apps to bully each other with, but they are training eagles to hunt fish for them. Whatever intelligence they got that humanity lost hasn’t translated into using language beyond the spoken, so they have not advanced to a comparable level that humanity was at when it fell. They’re probably at the stage humanity was at 10,000 years ago, at the agrarian stage.

Noa (Owen Teague) is our new audience surrogate, or at the very least our main character. He is the son of the chief, naturally, in a tribe where one’s ability to train eagles seems to be of paramount importance. He is a chimpanzee, like Caesar, and has some leadership qualities. But he has doubts.

He is not the strongest chimp, nor the smartest, and as the son of a chief who isn’t, at the ordained time, able to bring back an eagle egg safely for some bonding ceremony, it looks like he’s cursed to live a life of mediocrity, even as a nepo baby.

dir: Brad Peyton

2024

Like, did you ever want to watch a whole movie where Jennifer Lopez argues continuously with her GPS / Alexa / Siri for two hours?

Because if you have a subscription to Neflix, all this and more can be bafflingly yours.

This curious lite sci-fi flick has a hero, being JLo, representing humanity, and a villain, Harlan (Simu Liu), representing AI. Don’t worry yourself, the flick goes to absolutely no trouble to define or explain what AI means in this context: all it means is when computers or robots want to kill us.

Like almost every instance of cinematic AI, in this film’s world, an AI that was otherwise docile has a moment and loses its shit, and infects all the other AIs, and they start killing humanity. So it’s Skynet, but instead of the Austrian beefcake of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger representing the AI, it’s the young handsome features of Simu Liu, but with blue eyes, so we know he’s evil.

He has decided that in order to save humanity he has to kill most of them, but leave a tiny fraction alive, to keep as pets, maybe? Anyway, in the middle of some crucial battle he flies off into outer space, eventually to return, we presume.

Twenty eight years later, a woman called Atlas, being JLo, who clearly is carrying the whole world on her shoulders, gets a chance to find out where he is so she can presumably kill him, kill him dead, and save humanity.

She is very distrustful of AI technology, but, wouldn’t you know it, the plot compels her to put aside her misgivings about AIs in order to bond with an AI in order to bring Harlan down. So the vast majority of this movie is watching JLo arguing with someone who isn’t there physically. Because us humans are quite dumb, and nowhere near as smart as AIs, to represent this disembodied AI, we are shown a glowing orb of some description, blue and yellow, sort of, so we know that she isn’t completely crazy and just talking to herself.

What doesn’t help, in terms of not seeming ‘crazy’, is that fucking hairstyle.