Tag Archives: science fiction

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

The Tomorrow War (2021) Movie Review

July 2, 2021 Alex Brannan Leave a comment

Chris McKay’s The Tomorrow War feels like a remnant of the ’90s, a stray fragment of sci-fi blockbuster flotsam that somehow landed on post-COVID streaming in 2021. Independence Day. Aliens. All the usual suspects of ’80s-’90s alien warfare action exist in the bones of this money-splattered-on-the-screen popcorn flick. And some Edge of Tomorrow (itself a far more successful throwback) thrown in. And maybe some Starship Troopers if you squint a little, minus the raw, biting satire that makes that film so special.

McKay—who has made a career directing, editing, and doing VFX on animated projects in The LEGO Movie franchise and on Adult Swim shows Robot Chicken and Morel Orel—makes his studio live action debut with The Tomorrow War. Undoubtedly, it is the biggest budget project in his list of jobs. It is also the most programmatic, generically vanilla project in the bunch.

In The Tomorrow War, a December soccer match is interrupted by military personnel, beamed into midfield, who inform the television audience of a war. A war which has not yet started. Within a year of this announcement, leaders around the world agree to Continue reading The Tomorrow War (2021) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Hotel Artemis (2018) Movie Review

June 8, 2018 Alex Brannan Leave a comment

Hotel Artemis, the science fiction crime film set on the backdrop of the rioting streets of 2028 Los Angeles, could be described as clunky. Bloated. Over-loaded. An exploitation action film in the clothing of a classier sheep. A lot of slick talk with little substance.

It is all of these things. And quite blatantly. But Drew Pearce’s film is also a helluva lot of entertainment value stuffed into a 93-minute feature.

The film finds a disparate group of injured criminals taking refuge in the eponymous hotel, a building of antiquity that could be Continue reading Hotel Artemis (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

The Titan (2018) Movie Review

April 15, 2018 Alex Brannan 1 Comment

Through the endless minutes of exposition at the front-end of The Titan, we hear a lot of what we have heard before in dystopian science fiction. Population is rising, while resources are dwindling. Pressures for survival have lit up violent conflicts across the world. Scientists and military personnel are desperate for a solution. Terraforming Saturn’s moon, Titan. Biogenetic enhancements to survive such a move. Medical trials gone wrong. Yadda yadda.

Rick Janssen (Sam Worthington) is one of these test subjects. A military man who was once thought MIA while in the Syrian desert, it is this incident that convinces the government that he is Continue reading The Titan (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Annihilation (2018) Movie Review

February 24, 2018 Alex Brannan Leave a comment

There is a scene midway through Annihilation, the latest science fiction expedition from Ex Machina writer-director Alex Garland, where a woman gets yanked off of the ground and rag-dolled by what appears to be a half-bear, half-warthog creature. It’s all right, though. We already knew this was coming.

The woman is one of five tasked with venturing into the “Shimmer,” an enclosed, alien space that crash landed on Earth near a lighthouse and began slowly expanding. Inside the Shimmer, the Continue reading Annihilation (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) Movie Review

October 7, 2017 Alex Brannan Leave a comment

Caution: This review makes mention of two key plot points of Blade Runner 2049 that may be construed as “spoilers,” even though both are pieces of plot information that are introduced early on in the film. Either way, Denis Villeneuve reportedly asked critics not to reveal any plot points of the film, so I guess you’ve been warned.

It has been 35 years since Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a dystopian urban image of a world in which people are hired to hunt down and “retire” artificial beings known as Replicants. Based on, if only in its philosophical quandaries, Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film questioned where the line between humanity and artificiality is.

The script of Blade Runner 2049 from Hampton Fancher and Michael Green continues this existential exploration. The film, directed by Denis Villeneuve, whose cinematic visions have only grown in terms of visuals and heady ideas, follows a new Blade Runner code-named K (Ryan Gosling) as he stumbles upon Continue reading Blade Runner 2049 (2017) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Colossal (2017) Movie Review

June 20, 2017 Alex Brannan 4 Comments

Colossal masquerades itself as a certain type of movie. It opens on the ominous, lingering image of a Kaiju-like monster. Then, sweeping shots of the New York skyline play out over a driving, Dark Knight trilogy-esque score. Then, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) enters, hungover and rambling thinly-veiled excuses to her boyfriend (Dan Stevens) about where she has been.

It doesn’t quite match the previously set tone, does it?

When her boyfriend leaves her due to her drinking problem, Gloria moves back to her hometown, where she falls in with an old friend named Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). An old friend who just so happens to own his father’s bar.

Remember that Kaiju that I mentioned earlier? Whelp…turns out it pantomimes the actions of Gloria when she sets foot on a playground she knew once as a child. It pantomimes everything, including Continue reading Colossal (2017) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Love It, Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Infinity Baby (2017) Movie Review

April 5, 2017 Alex Brannan Leave a comment

A seeming momma’s boy with blunt high standards and commitment issues (Kieran Culkin), two dopey lackeys with differing levels of alcohol intake (Kevin Corrigan and Martin Starr), and a take-no-prisoners, fast-talking white collar type (Nick Offerman). In short, a bunch of cold, insensitive pricks.

Thus is the cast of characters initially established in Infinity Baby. They all work at different rungs of the ladder for the eponymous company, whose aim is to get rid of thousands of babies who never age. A botched stem cell experiment, compliments of Mitsubishi.

The film fully acknowledges the laundry list of flaws that this infinity baby premise presents. In fact, it Continue reading Infinity Baby (2017) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Sci-Fi/Fantasy

ARQ (2016) Movie Review

September 24, 2016 Alex Brannan 1 Comment

ARQ, the new original movie from OTT service Netflix, is woefully standard. Not only is it woefully standard, but it is a blatant premise ripoff of the criminally under-seen Edge of Tomorrow. Renton (Robbie Amell), or, as he is affectionately referred to by his compatriot Hannah (Rachael Taylor), Ren, finds himself stuck in a time loop paradox in which the same infiltration of his hidden compound occurs over and over again.

The world of ARQ is the typical post-apocalyptic science fiction: savages and raiders rule, food is a scarce resource, random technological innovations litter the screen. This said, the world of ARQ is not Continue reading ARQ (2016) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Like It, Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Star Trek Beyond (2016) Movie Review

July 21, 2016 Alex Brannan Leave a comment

Three years into a five-year mission, the crew of the Star Trek Enterprise make a routine stop at the Yorktown Star Fleet space station. There, Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is tasked with locating a missing vessel, a mission that ends in an ambush. The villainous Krall (Idris Elba) crashes the Enterprise, stealing away most of the crew and stranding the rest on a nearby planet.

Star Trek Beyond is a lot of bells and whistles, flashing lights and sweeping camera moves. While this at times yields action-packed returns and visuals that call for oohs and ahs, the spectacle as a whole is Continue reading Star Trek Beyond (2016) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Indie Films, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Short Films

An In-Depth Analysis of Sunspring (2016), The Short Film Written By A Computer

June 12, 2016 Alex Brannan 3 Comments

Note: Spoilers for Sunspring are in this in-depth review. The video is embedded below if you want to watch before you read.

In Sunspring, director Oscar Sharp engages in a cinematic experiment. The goal: to create an award-worthy short film using a script written by an artificial intelligence. The result: glorious sci-fi chaos. Feeding the A.I. with dozens of science fiction script .txt files and a series of prompts given for a sci-fi filmmaking competition, the small cast and crew used the resulting script to shoot the short in one day.

“In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood,” Thomas Middleditch’s H begins, upon pulling a book out of a drawer and thumbing through it. “It’s something I could do.”

This is perhaps the most Continue reading An In-Depth Analysis of Sunspring (2016), The Short Film Written By A Computer →