Alien: Romulus (2024)

This checkbox-ticking exercise dutifully opens on a steampunk spaceship with glitchy 80s tech sailing across dark silent space, has the sleeping pods of a ragtag bunch of mercenaries open, features the curious space soundtrack, has some (but not too much) Weyland-Yutani context, and of course, there are synthetics, stomach eruptions, and women fused to walls, but what keeps it fresh is the teen cast - this is the Alien we know and love presented with a Scream/Final Destination teen-horror sensibility and it is a very effective addition to the canon with lots of terrific heart-stopping and inventive action.

★★★★☆

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Reminiscence (2022)

What was apparently intended was a noir detective story set in a water-inundated future world - Hugh Jackman's Nick provides the hardboiled voiceover, wondering out-loud things like why a dame like Rebecca Ferguson's sultry bar singer Mae walked into a "memory detective" agency like his - but the photography is glossy, the actors look like they are in a fashion magazine, the set design is 'Dick Tracy' cartoony and cheap like an escape room, and the lighting is 'BioShock' neon and bright, leaving you with the impression that the writer, the lighting person, the set designer, and the actors needed to sit down together at least once for a production meeting.

★★☆☆☆

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Contact (1997)

In Robert Zemeckis' adaptation that does a good job of digesting into an engrossing blockbuster the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan's novel, a researcher (Jodie Foster, in top form, perfectly cast) sits under satellite dishes with headphones listening for messages from outerspace, eventually coming across a code blipped from somewhere far off, the deciphered message of which is a set of instructions to build something, but religious leaders are wary and politicians are defensive as space agencies hurry to act.

★★★★☆

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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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What Happened To Monday (2017)

In an overpopulated world of food shortages and unrest, a one-child policy is strictly enforced meaning illegal septuplets, all played The Klumps-style by Noomi Rapace, grow up confined to an apartment with each able to venture outside only on their one allocated day per week and only provided they all pretend to be the same person, which is the starting point of this patently absurd scifi action that sees the septuplets' lives (blessed lives free from health emergencies, apartment fires, unwanted visitors and noise complaints from neighbours) suddenly thrown into disarray when "Monday" goes missing and the remaining six, despite their cloistered upbringings, find themselves suddenly able to take on evil agents repeatedly breaking down their apartment door.

★★☆☆☆

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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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Dune (1984)

This 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's dense and difficult 800-page read was at one point ten to fourteen hours of footage that over the course of director David Lynch's famously difficult production, was pared down to just two, and the result is laughable, with glib voiceovers bridging those lost hours on the cutting-room floor and mere sentences attempting to confer importance on too many details - too many feudal empires and ruling families warring over a precious resource on the planet Arrakis - but nonetheless the movie succeeds as a psychedelic rock opera full of fantastic SFX (a floating bloated villain, gleaming hyper-blue eyes, gigantic earthworms, yellow upside-down lightning) all set to a Toto-and-Brian Eno soundtrack, a heady, mind-numbing treat bringing to mind the camp excess and pulp spectacle of Flash Gordon - for better or worse.

★★★☆☆

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Memoria (2021)

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movie, an almost plotless stringing together of quiet, painterly and occasionally long and perfectly still moments, defies conventions and easy categorisation and is absolutely hypnotic, about a Canadian (Tilda Swinton) in Bogota, Colombia who wakes one morning to the sound of a strange earthy thud and then starts to experience oddities in her interactions with her sick sister, whom she is visiting, and in her blossoming friendship with a sound engineer named Hernan.

★★★★☆

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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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Spider-man: No Way Home (2021)

I wasn't always rivetted, as evidenced by the fact I was able to make to-do lists in my head as the dizzying cgi-action sequences went on and on, but there's no denying the cleverness of this Spider-man movie (the sixth Marvel film to feature Tom Holland as the webslinger but the first to characterise him as a mature agent of salvation, not a juvenile wannabe meter-out of violent justice), one that makes all the previous iterations of Spider-man, the ones with Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire or even, say, Shinji Tôdô an extension of this movie, neatly rendering moot any and all past inconsistencies in plot or character or circumstance that may have niggled at viewers of umpteen versions, making everything connected and sensible and, get ready for it, ripe for multiple concurrent Spider-man releases.

★★★★☆

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Alien Vs Predator - Requiem (2007)

In the second of this daft series of movies that pits Predators from Predator movie against Aliens from Alien - though scene after dark, murky scene fails to distinguish which is which - the action shifts from the first movie's subterranean Antarctic pyramid to small-town USA, where way too many human characters blur together while a Predator, again sporting woeful Amstrad CPC-quality predator-vision, hunts Aliens whose number and purpose for marauding the town remain maddeningly unclear - they are just having a bad day, maybe.

★☆☆☆☆

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Alien vs. Predator (2004)

A security guard at work assures me that the bringing together of the Predator from the Predator movies and the Alien from the Alien movies into an Alien Vs Predator (AVP) series of movies isn't silly, that the two series and two monsters complement each other nicely, but this first movie of the series has a research team investigating an underground pyramid in the Antartic, unleashing from a prison the beginnings of a long Predator/Alien mythology that is pretty bloody silly. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Door Into Summer (夏への扉 キミのいる未来へ) (2021)

Robert A Heinlein's 1956 science fiction novel is turned here into an unhurried Japanese 'heartful' drama mixed with madcapped and madly paced science fiction of a distinctly "Back To The Future" kind (replete with a mad professor in a white coat screaming about there being no time to lose to a bewildered kid in a orange/red puffer jacket) but the two elements - sloooow heartful drama and zany science fiction -  do not sit well together, plus the sight of the pretty-J-boy hero turning to booze, swigging from a flask, or the cat-hating J-femme fatale "letting go" and becoming a hideous Jabba the Hut draws unintended laughs, detracting from the scifi adventure.

★★☆☆☆

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The Astronaut's Wife (1999)

Charlize Theron, at least, got a chance at a do-over in The Devil's Advocate, another, better scifi-fantasy in which a woman with a boy-cut experiences mental collapse while her husband becomes distracted by otherworldly issues at work, a concept that works well within the context of a morally bankrupt law firm but which here, set in Florida and centred around NASA male astronauts and their wives who wait fearfully on Earth, never is definitively a story about mental health nor alien abduction nor paranormality nor trauma, is never exactly a story about the after-effects of space travel, of loneliness, of body snatching, nor twinship, just a long string of ponderous scenes, the tedium of which is eventually put to death by an hysterical ending so random it is as if it comes suddenly from outer space.

★☆☆☆☆

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Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Terminator 2 was the best one, wasn't it, and so it is little wonder the floundering, misstepping series, having tried among other things forward time travel and making John Connor bad, has done a full-circle and with this 2019 episode is trying especially hard to emulate that second, 1989 one, featuring as it does a white-singletted tech-enhanced Sarah Connor lookalike leading the charge against a T-1000 lookalike (a liquid metal bot from the future with the requisite short dark hair, the tried-and-true steely look and some new tricks up its policeman-uniform sleeves) and the action happens on highways in trucks and helicopters, the drivers-seats of which the morphing bot slops into and out of a la Robert Patrick, and to help mark this movie as something more than a vacuous action retread, Arnie returns (and has one of the funniest lines of the entire series to date (<deadly serious> I said, 'Don't. Don't do it!') as well as Linda Hamilton, though perhaps she signed on very late into production - it appears very much like the young thing in her white singlet was originally intended as a Ripley B/ Sarah Connor B character, perhaps rewritten last minute?

★★★☆☆

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Coherence (2013)

The kooky premise - those gathered at a dinner party start to experience mindbending things as a comet passes overhead - will certainly keep you watching but as the high concepts snowball and near, well, incoherence, this ambitious low-budget film stays indoors and stays focused on the more easily, more cheaply captured domestic goings-on among the party guests (one of them Nicholas Brendan of Buffy fame) - so glowsticks, boxes, rings, numbers on photos, and bottles of wine become the preoccupation while the more interesting space- and time-warping things happening outside are, well, left in the dark. 

★★★☆☆

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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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Tenet (2020)

It is basically a James Bond movie - an icy-cool, broody Daniel Craig one - but instead of a nuclear code or a diamond-powered laser or nude bomb, John David Washington's agent is pursuing a villain armed with a travel-backwards-through-time machine, meaning it's a Bond film loaded with mind-bending scenes in which some characters move forward and others backward through time, but just relax, remind yourself it's just an action film, and try to enjoy the nonsense...with subtitles on (it's incomprehensible otherwise) and while ignoring the second half's frequent clunking exposition and unsuccessful attempts at injecting emotion into the high-concept action.

★★★☆☆

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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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