The Substance (2024)

The gothic fairytale The Substance very efficiently sets up how the peculiar science at its core works - an unboxing scene reveals boldly labelled products, one after the other, that neatly, cleverly explain the workings of a substance that promises rejuvenation to Demi Moore's has-been tv star Elisabeth Sparkle - but then the movie uses voiceover and those bold labels repeatedly flashed on screen to hammer home again and again what has been firmly established, making the really very humorous body horror movie more and more of a camp pantomime for imbeciles as it goes along.

★★★☆☆

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Ghost In The Shell (2017)

Masamune Shirow's manga, previously brought to the big screen in 1997 as the celebrated (and confusing) anime feature, is adapted here as a cartoony live action scifi but despite whiz-bang visual effects, not much interest is generated in the story of Major Kusanagi (a wooden, stiff Scarlet Johansson), the cyborg with a human mind (or "ghost" as we are repeatedly told) tasked with investigating the assassinations of several Hank company executives.

★★☆☆☆

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Blade Runner (1982)

This classic film noir, an adaptation of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a gumshoe-turned-bounty hunter tasked with tracking down, in a future cyberpunk-neon Los Angeles of perpetual rain, six runaway replicants, androids built by the Tyrell Corporation replete with emotions and memories, making it hard for Deckard to distinguish them from humans.

★★★★☆ 

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Capricorn One (1977)

Scripted in 1972 just three years after the moon landing, this slow burn, engrossing suspense takes a conspiracy theory levelled at that real-world event and applies it to a future faked Mars landing with the astronauts involved (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and, ahem, OJ Simpson) realising themselves in grave danger given they have become keepers of an awfully big government secret while hidden out-of-public-view, supposedly on the red planet.

★★★★☆

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2:22 (2017)

Most of the energy put into this Australian film, a sci-fi romantic thriller about a man experiencing odd things at 2:22pm each day, is spent trying to make Melbourne and Sydney look like New York City (or at least trying to make them look not unlike New York City, with the camera sticking close to the actors and street scenes cutting short just before a tram rumbles past), and there's not much energy to be found anywhere else because the tone is supposed to be ethereal, mystical, and mesmeric, and the two leads - playing the world's worst air traffic controller, and a victim of the near-aviation incident he causes - are brought together by Fate with their destinies written in the stars, so they are essentially automatons going through the motions whether they understand why they keep ending up at Grand Central Station or not.

★★☆☆☆

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The Omega Man (1971)

Germ warfare in a Sino-Russian war turns everyone into Paul Bettany's character in The Da Vinci Code and it is up to an often shirtless Charlton Heston, the only person in the world not yet an eloquent albino with problematic life philosophies, to find a cure before this unrewarding scifi thriller, in which nothing much actually happens, ends up even longer than it already is.

★★☆☆☆

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The Faculty (1998)

When one student says suspiciously of another, "We don't know what she is - gay, lesbian, or alien," and when problems at school are solved by snorting a home-laboratory-manufactured drug and waving a gun around, you start getting nervous about the messages in director Robert Rodriguez's sci-fi horror set in a high school and apparently based on Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers, but a surprisingly star-studded cast (Usher, Jon Stewart, Selma Hayek, and others) distracts from this irksomeness and lets other aspects of the movie pay effective tribute to the B-grade horror scifi movies of the 50s.

★★☆☆☆

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Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Paul W S Anderson's third Resident Evil directorial effort - the fifth movie in the series - dutifully brings the game franchise to life again, delivering the zombie-killing action across a series of distinct, game-like map areas and peppering scenes with fan-pleasing nostalgia - Umbrella Corporation logos, red barrels, ladders that slowly extend downwards, and a host of familiar characters played by actors who speak and move like polygon clusters - but even as a huge fan of the series myself, I find it hard to imagine anyone would be still paying attention at the one-hour mark, by which point this slick but completely vacant horror action exercise has been well and truly, er, done to death.

★★★☆☆

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The Medusa Touch (1978)

There's a murder attempt in the opening scene - a man watching a news story about astronauts is bludgeoned - and then, as the victim lies in hospital, an investigation is launched which reveals in flashbacks from the man's life the queer paranormal context of the crime, in this gripping 1978 film, part science-fiction, part police procedural, and part supernatural thriller with Richard Burton beautifully playing the tortured central character both sympathetic and terrifying, like a grown-up Damien.

★★★★☆

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Event Horizon (1997)

More Hellraiser than Alien, this horror (not scifi) movie from director Paul W S Anderson really does make space travel feel like time spent stuck in a hellbox, especially given H R Giger, not ergonomics, has informed the design of the ship and chaos, not sense, governs the shouty, gory events on board.

★☆☆☆☆

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Westworld (1973)

In this 1973 Michael Crichton written and directed scifi thriller, the author's first directorial effort, Isla Nubla is an immersive theme park and the dinosaurs are robots built to interact with and accommodate the high-paying tourists' every holiday whim, and while especially shallow (the plot is three-quarters peculiar robot glitches that perturb the theme park scientists but not enough to progress the plot, and one quarter sudden showdown (in which mildly perturbed scientists flip their lids and turn suddenly into shrieking there's-no-stopping-them, robots-will-kill-us-all nihilists) it is a ripping sci-fi tale full of Planet Of The Apes/Soylent Green era kitsch and quite prescient future-imagining, with amusing performances from Richard "The 70s? I'm in everything" Benjamin, Josh "Am I twenty or seventy?" Brolin, and a 1973 version of the T-800, a sinister, sparkly-eyed Yul Brynner.

★★★★☆

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

James Franco is a bit self-consciously James Franco in this 2011 first of the rebooted Planet of the Apes series of movies but his inwardness doesn't stop this being a terrifically entertaining blockbuster about Caesar, an intelligent ape, who ends up leading as rousing an uprising as any you've seen before in cinema, with the movie playing a little like what it would have been like if Alfred Hitchcock had included a first act explaining the terrible battery farm treatment that first made the birds mad.

★★★★☆

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Ad Astra (2019)

Baby Astronaut goes to a great deal of trouble to reconnect with long-lost Papa Astronaut, not only embarking on an epic trip with multiple transfers, lengthy stopovers and terrible inflight service but also making the effort to narrate his tribulations apparently aware that an audience somewhere is watching him, and while it is all spectacularly filmed and suitably measured and mesmeric for a deep space film, a middle section features clunky, lurching plot progression and the emotion, when it comes, barely registers.

★★★☆☆

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High Life (2018)

Robert Pattinson plays Monte, a man travelling around space in a facility that looks like a 70s stereo speaker, and for so long as it isn't known why he is there, why he is alone with a baby, who he is reporting to via a computer interface, and why whoever he reports to ekes out in small parcels the resources necessary for Monte to sustain his and his charge's lives, this sci-fi remains mesmeric and intriguing, but once the answers to these questions are revealed not very long into the movie, there arise far more questions than answers, especially since the movie becomes infatuated with the human body internal - matters of masturbation and secretions, erections and blunt trauma, urine and excrement - at the cost of the far more interesting - even pivotal - stuff of this space-life's social order (how this world was exactly supposed to work, whether the characters are acting naturally and of their own volition, how any control could have been expected, etc, etc) which is left completely unaddressed and, to use a sci-fi analogy, the promise of the characters, the plot, and the claustrophobia of that stereo-speaker prison floating through space, all disappears into a black hole.

★★☆☆☆

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Invaders From Mars (1986)

In filling his movie with wooden acting, stilted dialogue, several benign sideplots that add nothing except length to the runtime, and garish monster puppetry of a distinctly 80s horror variety, director Tobe Hooper pretty much nails the look and feel of a B-movie sci-fi classic of the 40s and 50s, and in fact this IS a remake of the 1953 movie of the same name, about a schoolkid who first witnesses a flash in the sky, then notices his parents acting strangely, then becomes alarmed as more and more people from town wander up and over the hill near his house and come back as monotone weirdos with welts on their necks.

★★★☆☆

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Circle (2015)

You'd imagine you'd woken up in the studio of a new reality tv gameshow - wouldn't you? - when you found yourself among a group of strangers standing in a circle voting each other 'off the island' by way of electric zaps from a central pop-o-matic dice bubble, but time is short - individuals are being killed off one by one every ninety seconds - so everyone readily commits to the idea they've been abducted by aliens like it's a body and voice warm-up exercise requiring complete commitment in an actors' studio, and so with the absurdity of the premise put aside, things become a waiting game to see who will be the last standing and to see how this quirky low-budget Cube-like sci-fi fantasy will make its "who are your draft picks for your super NFL team" negotiations worthwhile viewing to the end..

★★★☆☆

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The Abyss (1989)

Three years after his huge success sending a Sigourney Weaver-led crew of marines on a deep-space salvage mission in Aliens, James Cameron blasts a Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio-led crew of oil engineers on a deep-sea salvage mission where an Aliens' gun metal blue and grey colour-palette (cut across with bright yellow industrial pipes and machinery) is the setting for a convergence of underdeveloped plotlines (like one character's bad case of the bends, a volatile marriage, and political tensions between Russia and the USA), things all better explained in a later released extended version but here only very loosely held together by the presence in the movie's periphery of a species of, what, lost jellyfish Aliens?

★★★☆☆

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The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

The creators of the Cloverfield movies seem to be developing the series in a way akin to going into a bookshop, selecting books from different sections and finding ways to connect the disparate genres with an overarching universe, and so one dimension of this third movie to enjoy is seeing how their intellectual writers' game ends up tying together this scifi set on a space station to an underground abduction thriller and a much earlier found-footage creature feature, but the other dimension - simply enjoying each movie as a standalone - is where these movies - and this movie yet again - fall down because while the universal ties are intriguing, it doesn't take an astrophysicist to see the two dimensions do not co-exist very well, with poor plotting (spaceships that eat arms but then don't, inexplicable magnet troubles and astronauts who one minute don't know what is going on and the next know that flicking a switch reverses dimensional shifts) letting down the grander plans for the series.

★★☆☆☆

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Terminator Salvation (2009)

Unwisely, the Terminator series takes us for the first time to a time after the apocalyptic Judgement Day (until now, just an occasionally glimpsed bleak potential future our heroes have been working hard to avoid) and suddenly we are learning more than we ever cared to know about John Connor's dreary war against the machines - it is more Transformers with Mad Max stylings than Terminator - and muddying the Terminator formula even more than this is a lead Wolverine character whose uninteresting journey into the future delays the movie we actually wanted to watch which starts twenty minutes before the end.

★★☆☆☆

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The Terminator (1984)

For an 80s sci-fi action that is essentially a string of cgi-free car and foot chases set to broken synthesizer chords and interrupted with occasional scenes of exposition (our mulleted heroes trying to soberly discuss a ridiculous time-travelling robot assassin plot), the original 1984 Terminator is a masterpiece and even more enjoyable to rewatch now to see the genesis of the Terminator motifs that recur throughout the sequels, like the first appearance of Dr Silberman (here dismissing as mental illness the robot killer threat but himself destined for the insane asylum) and Arnie's first utterance of the line, "I'll be back," and a few clever smaller details like the scene where a fellow waitress being glib about the future tells Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor not to worry about the customer's child who spoons ice cream into her apron pocket because no-one is going to care in 100 years.

★★★★☆

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