The Sci Fi Guy

I’ll admit this much – I’ve never read a Harry Potter book in my life. I cringe at the thought. I watched the first movie (sans book) and thought it was pretty dull. But part of me really appreciates what that series of books has done – by turning on a lot of kids to reading. Just getting a child’s face in to a book these days seems like a daunting challenge, especially in the vastly more connected world of today.

Coming in October is another movie adaptation of a children’s book – The City of Ember. The premise is made of the stuff I love – mankind has lost the ability to live on the surface of Earth, and so has constructed a city (Ember) miles underground for mankind’s survivors. Only catch? The city only lasts 200 years. When the time is up, presumably, the planet will be ready for humans again.

Featuring a pretty good cast including Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, and Martin Landau (amongst others), this looks like a great flick for the scifi-minded children. I was fortunate to grow up with titles like Tron, Willow, The Neverending Story, and Labyrinth (thanks for creeping me out David Bowie), and I think Ember might be just the movie to capture the imagination for kids of many ages. I’m keeping my fingers crossed this earns a PG rating to ensure that even the young ones can give it a shot – and of course I hope many parents will encourage their children to read the book before going to see the movie. Nothing’s better than instilling in an entire generation the joy of saying, “Meh, the book was better.”

The internet can be an interesting place if you spend enough time getting lost on it. Somehow I went from watching a video demonstration about a new video server that I was thinking about using, to discovering this little short film titled Things Fall Apart on a website called Devoid of Yesterday. It’s only about 2 and a half minutes long, but this artsy short features some provoking music, and frankly chilling visuals of a world not unlike our own.

The film has all the great elements of great science fiction short fiction… The sense that the piece we receive is far less than what might truly be out there. If you’ve got a couple minutes and want to see something off the beaten path, I suggest you give it a shot. Exciting editor’s note… I just created a new category called “Science Fiction ‘Web’”… Hopefully I’ll veer even further off the path and see if I can find some exciting scifi-stuff manifesting itself on the web.

Back in the 1990’s, Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, and Madeline Stowe showed up to put together a strange (soon to be cult) movie called 12 Monkeys. Thanks to a little On Demand magic, I cued it up, and was reminded of what a well put together movie they’d really invented.

For those that haven’t seen it – 12 Monkeys basically tells the tale of James Cole, a prisoner in a bleak future where man kind has been forced underground by the emergence of a destructive virus that’s wiped out 99% of the population. The remaining civilization (if you can even call it that) is relegated to bleak citcumstances, but somehow along the way they did invent time travel. Cole must now travel to the past – where he meets Madeline Stowe, psychiatrist extraordinarre, and where his mind begins to unravel on him. Part of his mind thinks he was sent to the past to uncover the secret actions of the “Army of the 12 Monkeys” – the political terror group that unleashes the virus on mankind. But the other part of him believes that he’s actually crazy – that the future he believes he’s from is just a figment of the imagination. Sure enough, we get a little dose of Stockholm syndrome on the part of Stowe, and Brad Pitt’s character accuses Willis’ of creating the reality by which Pitt is now enacting.

Overall, 12 Monkeys is a complex story, and has enjoyed reasonably good cult success since it’s release in 1995. The film features little in the way of advanced computer graphics or sophisticated special effects that are so often deemed prerequisites of contemporary science fiction. Rather, 12 Monkeys does much of what Kevin Spacey’s K-Pax accomplished by creating a sincere doubt in the mind of the audience as to the validity of the alternate realities that these “time travelers” (or in K-Pax, dimensional travelers) are explaining.

Could it be possible that time travelers are sitting in the worlds’ mental institutions? Sure, why not. We’re all sci-fi fans here, right? If you haven’t done it in a while, dust off your copy of 12 Monkeys and give it another go, and if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and set aside a couple hours to rent this great 90’s science fiction story.

I have a bad habit of getting around to reviewing movies far after it becomes relevant. Cest la vie, this is another of those reviews.

Will Smith’s I Am Legend is a tale about a man and his dog… And zombie vampires. In short, Smith plays Robert Neville, a government scientist, who is trapped in the gritty future as a man alone in the city of New York. Set a few years in the future, Neville is working on both trying to stay alive and also on finding a way to save the victims of a mysterious plague that has befallen mankind. For some reason, Neville is immune, and tries to find a serum that can cure those that are already infected by breaking down his bloodline and granting that immunity to the plagued.

Visually, I Am Legend doesn’t disappoint. The CGI effects on the plauge-ridden people isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad either. You can definitely tell that they’re computer generated, but it’s not terrible. Where Legend really shines is in the production of a full New York City of the future, filled with animals and beginning to become overrun by neglect. The film maker, who also did Constantine (and, uhm, a bunch of pop music videos) – Francis Lawrence – obviously realized that the set for this film would be the maker or breaker for the audience.

All told, Legend is a good story that takes advantage of the fact that Will Smith is an incredibly charismatic actor. Like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, the bulk of the movie centers just on the one character, and like Hanks, he has slowly lost his mind.

Look for I Am Legend to come out on DVD and if you didn’t get to see it in theaters, make sure to rent this one and see how you like it.

Point blank: I don’t think I’ve done enough drugs to get this one. THX 1138 is a trippy mind bender set in a police utilitarian state where the workers build robotic policemen and have to stay sedated and / or medicated at all times (the workers, not the robots).

The audio is strange. The imagery is strange. Everything is backdropped on plain white canvases. I’m pretty sure there’s even a robot that jerks Robert Duvall off. Strange.

I tried really hard to understand what this movie was about, but throughout the duration (another quick movie – just 88 minutes) I kept asking myself, “Why the hell am I watching this?” Duvall doesn’t captivate me, and the way the audio is mixed makes it extremely hard to even understand which exact character I’m listening to. Then there’s the fact that everyone’s bald (including the ladies), except for a midget that shows up in an insane asylum room that’s all white. If you’re having trouble keeping up with my synopsis of the movie, you can see how frustrating it is to actually watch the movie!

Anyways, I’ll chalk this 1971 “classic” up to my standard response whenever I see a movie like this: I haven’t done enough drugs to get it.

Mankind’s future is pretty bleak – extraordinarily bleak in fact – in the movie Children of Men, adapted from P.D. James’ story of the same name. In the year 2009, the last child is born, and since that day, for unknown reasons, women across the globe have become infertile.

The movie begins with a television reporter announcing that the youngest person on the planet, “Baby Diego” has been killed at age 18. Clive Owen meanwhile is busy trying to buy a cup of coffee, and as he leaves the coffee shop the grim state of the world is revealed: a bomb explodes at the coffee shop that he was just visiting.

From there, Children of Men portrays an Earth that has essentially given up on itself. Societies everywhere are crumbling, and England is trying to hold on to the last of it’s civilization. Immigrants are hunted and captured to travel to terrible prison camps where hope is in short supply. Theo, played by Clive Owen, finds all of it a little absurd – he doesn’t care about the decline of the world, and his apathy is only emboldened by the threat to his life and the death of Baby Diego. However, his ex-wife turned rebel “terrorist” played by Julianne Moore needs his help.

What follows is the tale of our anti-hero Theo discovering that there may yet be hope for humanity, in the form of a pregnant immigrant that desperately needs to reach the mythical Human Project to keep her baby protected from the governments of the Earth.

Children of Men is a unique movie, in both cinematic qualities and also the storyline itself. It portrays a planet in decay similar to stories like 1984 and V for Vendetta. There is a certain assumption that at some point, if humanity faces extinction that the whole system will simply break down. This is a pessimistic view of the future that has actually be echoed in dozens of stories in numerous mediums.

From a visual standpoint, Children of Men features some awesome cinematography courtesy of nonstop one-camera scenes. It’s rare to see a movie that maintains a single camera for such a long shot, including everything from planning a getaway to running away from enemies while trying to jumpstart a car, or running through a prison camp under attack from nearly every angle. These shots give Children a gritty feeling, and it also speaks volumes to the special effects coreography that had to go in to making the entire film work. My only complaint about nearly the entire movie is a scene where Michael Caine puts on some “Zen” music that is waaay too loud for the rest of the soundtrack, and is filled with shrieks and screams. It’s a crappy scene, and if you’re in a quiet neighborhood like I am, you try not to alarm the neighbors with screaming soundtracks.

Overall, I enjoyed Children of Men, and I think I owe it to myself to put the book on my reading list as well to see how things compare.

It’s hard to admit sometimes when you enjoy a guilty pleasure that essentially everyone has said time and time again is bad for you. The world of Science Fiction is no better off – critics from all sides have weighed in on some titles and rendered them meritless, stupid, and downright bad. One of those examples that comes to mind is Kevin Costner’s post-apocalypse The Postman.

First off, the truth. I liked The Postman even before I knew what a single reviewer or friend had to say about it. Once I did realize that it was panned as a goofy post apocalypse story of essentially zero merit, I shared my enjoyment of this film with only a select few. Well, this Internet thing changes who those “select few” are, and so it’s without the guilt and shame of childhood that I say once and for all, “I liked that movie!”

Okay, there’s really nothing spectacular about The Postman. It delivers a sappy story about postmen, which I still don’t quite see as being the most important link from one town to the other. It seems so much easier to believe that radios would’ve survived the devestation that wiped out our future history. But, alas, if its postmen that are needed to restore order and faith in the future, so be it.

What Postman delivers is a couple hours of suspend-your-belief-of-what-the-future-even-after-an-apocalypse should be like story. The good-versus-evil between Costner and Will Patton (as the silly General Bethlehem: former copy machine salesman turned war monger) is enjoyable, since Patton delivers a performance that kinda makes you like the crazy leader of the war tribe he’s set up. Just like Dennis Hopper’s “smokers” of Waterworld, the Holnists are the archetype “stormtroopers”. I’m pretty sure their slogan would be “be bad because someone has to.”

Okay, it’s a junky movie. It’s a guilty sin. It’s ordering cheesecake when you’re on a diet. Sure you shouldn’t have it, and even more you shouldn’t enjoy it. But it’s there and sometimes you just need some mindless joy. Thanks, Kevin. Got time for a sequel?