Passengers (2016)

** SPOILER ALERT **

A ripper sci-fi premise (a man's hibernation chamber malfunctions and he wakes up on a spaceship 90 years ahead of schedule) offers the potential to explore lives off-course and the human response to the abject loneliness of deep space isolation, but instead a glossy Hollywood romance takes place, only to be squandered by two things - plotting as full of holes as the breached hull of a spaceship, and the last-minute introduction of a "come back alive" machine.

★★☆☆☆

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2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)

This science fiction sequel is fascinating for having special effects that are worse in 1984 than the prequel in 1968 sixteen years earlier, and where that Kubrick film was philosophical, metered, balletic and profound, this is like a DLC expansion pack offering fans a quick add-on storyline that isn't terrible (Russian and American astronauts investigate the failed Discovery One mission to Jupiter) but is certainly, compared with the original, obvious, cursory, and fairly forgettable with a narrative driven by Captain Kirk-style diary logs. 

★★★☆☆

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Alien: Isolation

For anyone like me who loves the Alien movies, this sci-fi action adventure game is a must because it has you playing Amanda Ripley creeping around the Sevastopol space station searching for clues regarding the fate of her mother and is just like 'playing the movies', but beware: the experience of being stalked by an unpredictable AI alien is terrifying!

★★★★★

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Oblivion (2013)

There is something ho-hum about this sci-fi action and it isn't just that Tom Cruise is playing a character named Jack for the third time in his career - a serviceman, he trawls around a desolate future Earth (like the one in Elysium complete with a tetrahedral spacestation hanging in its sky) fixing stuff (like a live-action Wall-E) until one day the woman quite literally of his dreams falls to Earth, raising questions about his past and memories and launching him into a battle for freedom under the command of Morgan Freeman (in dark glasses, looking very much like Morpheus in The Matrix).

★★☆☆☆

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Alien Resurrection (1997)

This time, in an Alien instalment too clever by half, Ripley is resurrected in director Jean-Paul Jeunet's "Delicatessen", a futuristic green-yellow world of zany characters and irreverent detail, but in fact, Ripley isn't Ripley at all but a Ripley-alien clone and empath who once again takes charge of a group of mercenaries when aliens - distinctly Jurassic Park raptor-like ones - break free from their Umbrella Corporation science experiment chambers and start - you guessed it - picking off everyone on board the Earth-bound spaceship Auriga (including elfin robot, Winona Ryder) one-by-especially-bloody-one.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Alien 3 (1992)

The gunmetal-blue quiet of space that marked the first two Alien movies is switched for the brown bluster of a prisoner-run refinery in this third movie directed by David Fincher and that change is the movie's fundamental flaw - rather than an unseen, unfathomable, latent horror suddenly, noisily bursting out of space's deep dark and quiet, here the alien burns around Thunderdome at breakneck speed, noisy, more lit up and visible and more understood than ever before, and it is killing not mercenaries or astronaut scientists but a noisy, repellent bunch of grubby convicts that it is hard to care about.

★★☆☆☆

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Alien (1979)

Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley became the archetypal kickass heroine after her introduction in this original Alien movie, essentially a pick-them-off-one-at-a-time horror like many American slasher flicks full of teens camping in remote locations with masked evil hunting them down, but Alien transcends its genre with its muted, echoey spaceship campground, its otherworldly Jason always kept at a distance, never seen fully extended, always in shadow and so not just masked but unfathomable, and the movie is rich in other details - robot crew members, extraterrestrial remains, slumber pods - that have been developed into a detailed mythology across four sequels to date (and happily counting!).

★★★★★

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Prometheus (2012)

This sci-fi horror on an epic scale has in its relatively short runtime way too many lofty themes and too many character story arcs - the one about Charlize Theron's family tree is the most clanging and underdeveloped - and so it all feels rushed, and in place of satisfying conclusions, there is an almost completely unnecessary - or, at least, unexplained - tie-in with Ridley Scott's Alien; nonetheless, this succeeds in being thought-provoking and entertaining.

★★★☆☆

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