Review: Arctic Blast

As this week's incident in Atlanta demonstrates, a region unaccustomed to severe winter conditions is much more likely to experience disaster-scale problems than more northerly regions, where everybody's used to it. Thus, it's at least partly forgivable when mistakes are made under unexpectedly wintry conditions in the former case.

What's not so forgivable is when you make a movie about a flash-freezing weather phenomenon and you obviously lack understanding of what being in harsh winter conditions is actually like. I hypothesize the director and/or screenwriter must've been natives of Tasmania—the setting of the cheap disaster movie Arctic Blast, which I only assume was on SyFy—where it doesn't go below zero (Fahrenheit). There's a special kind of sadness in a movie with such scientific pretensions and yet such obvious scientific failures.

Most of the "action" in Arctic Blast takes place in rooms full of computers—which is at least the right feel for a movie like this—but when it's not staring at screens, it gets a lot of mileage out of its main flash-freezing visual effect, which is obviously cheap but not terrible. Yet the antagonist—the titular "arctic blast"—never seems to fall below -120° F for the whole movie. Dangerously cold, yes; infrastructure-challengingly cold, yes; but end-of-the-world cold? Flash-freezing cold? So cold that you can't even see your breath?

Review: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Rewatching 2001 recently, I was struck by just how slow it is. I mean, you can't not notice it, but this time through it almost felt like it was daring people to finish it (as was, inarguably, Barry Lyndon). I don't think this is, as Nicholas Carr would allege, a symptom of my personal overexposure to the Internet and its having conditioned me to expect lightning-quick gratification. Indeed, I felt less impatient with 2001 than I have during any previous viewing. But the slowness is one of the things that intensely stands out, and newcomers to this legendary film should account for it before idly sitting down to it.

The shot from this rewatch that's haunting me is the immediate start of "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite." Preceded by a creepy but not overly dramatic mission recording from Dr. Floyd, this segment of the film opens on a monolith flying around Jupiter space, accompanied by an amped-up reprise of the "Love Theme from the Monolith" (you know, the one that goes "eeeeeeeeee eeeeeee eeEEE EEEeeee eeeeee eeeEEee"). The shot tilts downward and we see the Discovery, dwarfed by the Jovian worlds, and (because it's Kubrick) the shot lingers so long that the viewer's imagination begins to fill in context—an opportunity so few movies afford anymore—and we realize what Bowman must be feeling: isolation to a degree never before experienced by a human. He cannot go home, as far as he is aware; he can't even contact home. Not to mention abject terror at what he sees—remember, he only just learned about the monolith. I mean, Christ, how many movies achieve such a primal, visceral effect? And all this without seeing Bowman's face (because it's Kubrick).

This may be what I enjoy most about Kubrick movies: the space to imagine. That what we imagine should terrify the ever-loving fuck out of us is merely an added bonus.

Review: Man of Steel

Though I've never read a single frame of Superman in his comic-book form, I know enough about the franchise to perceive significant departures from it when I see them. Man of Steel features several, and while some work and some don't, it departs even more dramatically from what I would consider sensible narrative practice when your studio is endeavoring to start its own Marvel-like compound franchise.

The Avengers assembled (YEP I WENT THERE) its constituent hero team from a scattered group of uneven but generally successful superhero movies connected by rather thin and easily-ignored tendons of in-universality. This strategy obviously worked in terms of getting butts in the seats, but more than that, it worked for each hero-specific film: it freed up each filmmaker to pursue styles and stories independently for each feature, with really very little need to worry about stepping on the compound franchise's toes. This not only gives each feature a freshness that one doesn't get in more limited and repetitive franchises (such as Harry Potter) but also opens up the potential for pretty impressive feats of long-form storytelling. I personally don't feel that the Marvel films have achieved any such feats (though Iron Man 3 was a step in the right direction), but the potential is there, thanks to the Marvel formula.

Review: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Now that Western popular cinema has entered the post-Marvel, post-LOTR age—where serialization is not just accepted, but expected, in our blockbusters—it's interesting to look back on an era when such things were still pretty new. The original Star Wars trilogy began the modern version of the trend, and, alongside the Indy trilogy, the Star Trek film franchise reinforced the trend, proving it to be a viable strategy and not a series-specific aberration.

No film in any of those three franchises is quite as "serial" as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a.k.a. "the whale one." Each Star Wars installment began with a crawl, reminding us of Where We Last Left Our Heroes; the Indy movies had almost as little connection with one another as the Bond movies; and even Star Trek III took the time to show us a clip from the pivotal ending of Star Trek II, and worked in lots of in-narrative review of that film's events.

Contrast this with the comparatively abrupt opening of Star Trek IV. The opening council scene with John Shuck's Klingon ambassador provides some indirect summary of the previous two movies, then Kirk's first captain's log says "We're in the third month of our Vulcan exile," never fully explaining why they're exiled, let alone why the planet Vulcan would be harboring them. Ironic that the most financially successful Trek film (up until 2009) opens in a fashion so impenetrable, almost hostile, to the uninitiated viewer. It's not as though they could have assumed that every audience member saw The Search for Spock. (Indeed, it seems they even tacked on a weird prologue for the foreign markets under the assumption that too few people overseas had seen III.)

Review: American Warships

Those of us who are cursed to occasionally find ourselves in the mood for an Asylum mockbuster could do worse than American Warships, which came out the same time as Battleship and likewise concerns naval warfare with aliens—in this case, centered on the aging USS Iowa. Cheap and dumb by any measure, American Warships nonetheless displays minimal competence in story, pacing, some of the dialogue, and the leads' acting.

The leads in question are Mario Van Peebles in the Adama role (oh yeah, this movie also completely rips off the BSG pilot) and Carl Weathers in the "Trapped Forever in the Situation Room" role. Both actors maintain total seriousness throughout, which feels more forced coming from Van Peebles—but maybe that's just because he spent the whole shoot dreading the line "You're not gonna sink my battleship." Whatever the case, they're both perpetually watchable and they mostly retain their dignity, no matter how hard the rest of the film tries to strip them of it. Though I am still perplexed by Weathers' grizzled-prospector-style profanity.

Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness

Readers: if you happen to possess an affection for American cinema as an art form…what are you doing even reading this review in the first place?

You know it's gonna be dire. You remember the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek vehidebacle (term © Fraught Experiments LLC), and you learned to expect more of the same from the sequel's ubiquitous promotional material. You know it's just another schlockbuster (term © somebody else, probably), one which at best—at BEST—possesses a tiny glimmer of ambition and heart.

Let me just nip that optimism in the bud right now. If Hollywood is doomed, as some say, it will be because of movies like J.J. Trek In2 Darkness. The warmest words I have for it is that it seems like J.J. & Co. wanted to appear to evolve their franchise.

I say this because, Into Darkness is arguably about something—intentionally or not. This is notable when we remember that the Trek franchise pre-J.J. had always tried to be about something. Specifically, Into Darkness is about the morality of targeted killings.

Review: Star Trek (2009)

I wasn't really a nerd in school. I had to gain acceptance into their social stratum—I had to work up to nerddom (indeed, I never even played a tabletop RPG until college). This is largely because I moved from city to city and state to state so often that, statistically speaking, at any given point in my academic history I was probably the New Kid.

Table 1.1: School Social Strata ca. Reagan-Bush-Clinton Era

Stratum Name (Descending Order)	Access to Sex, Liquor, or Non-Homemade Drugs	Trek Franchise Investment
JOCKS	Complete	None
JOCK AFFILIATES	Moderate to Extreme	None
JOCK WOULD-BES (& Vo-Tech Hicks, Where Applicable)	Low to High	None
ARTY COOL TYPES	Moderate to High	None to Low
NERDS	None to Low	Low to Extreme
NEW KIDS & UGLIER FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENTS	None	None to Extreme
UNTOUCHABLES	That's Pretty Funny	Let's Just Say, Probably Writes Letters to Counselor Troi

(Don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this.) You will notice that the second and third columns above represent two major forms of escapism, for members of all strata, from the meat-grinder hellscape of their shared environment. You'll also notice that each of them is roughly inversely proportional to the other. That Star Trek was almost completely rejected by all but the lower strata is, I'm certain, a large part of Paramount's decision to not just reboot, not just reimagine, but thoroughly reinterpret the franchise with 2009's embarrassing film.

Review: Europa Report

My biggest fear about Europa Report (in which a monster is eventually discovered under the ice of the Jovian moon Europa, and don't think that's much of a spoiler, 'cuz it's not) was that it would prove to be fanciful and absurd a la Event Horizon. It's not that I don't enjoy Event Horizon, or sci-fi horror/thrillers of its ilk, but the market's a little saturated.

Moreover, I found Gravity compelling and realistic enough that other sci-fi thrillers will hereafter have a high standard of realism to live up to. This is why I'm reluctant to see Ghosts of Mars even though I know I should for several reasons.

But back to Europa Report. I'm pleased to…um…report that it's not ridiculous. It's got some structural problems, and many of its characters are ill-defined, but I found it engrossing and tense.

Review: Innerspace

Eighties movies run the gamut between "charmingly '80s" and "painfully '80s." Innerspace is kind of all over that gamut, which makes it a densely representative example of '80s cinema.

A thoroughly dopey sci-fi comedy, Innerspace stars Dennis Quaid (who I never realized was so leery) as a hotshot test pilot, shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the ass of a nerdy grocery-store clerk (Martin Short) via a series of improbable circumstances. Quaid establishes communication with Short, and their interactions (during their quest to figure out how to get Quaid out and un-shrunk) provide much of the film's amusement.

Review: Leviathan (1989)

1989's Leviathan borrows so much from Alien, The Thing, and similar futurey-horror blockbusters of its age that if you've seen a couple of them, you can safely skip Leviathan, because it adds pretty much nothing to your personal catalogue of filmwatching experiences—except possibly the ability to link Daniel Stern directly with Richard Crenna for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon purposes. But then, I just told you that, so you don't have to see it after all…unless your rules variant requires you to have actually seen the movies you reference, which, wow man, let me into THAT game.

Review: Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón (director of Children of Men and the best Harry Potter film, Prisoner of Azkaban) proves his chops once again with Gravity, a space thriller that I'm choosing to categorize as sci-fi even though it's not futuristic in any detectable way.

Indeed, it's a movie of its moment, particularly so if you're an astronomer or an astronaut, I'd imagine. The narrative's antagonist is the Kessler effect—the phenomenon of space debris crashing into other space debris and causing a cascade reaction as tiny, superfast pieces effectively multiply themselves. Part of me was hoping that, following the harrowing climax, the survivor(s) would address a session of Congress about the urgency of cleaning up our way-too-polluted orbital space. But that would have been preachy and lame, which is why I wasn't disappointed when it didn't happen.

Review: The Wild Blue Yonder

Though 2005's The Wild Blue Yonder is a Werner Herzog film, don't go into it expecting any of his trademark narration. Though it largely consists of documentary footage, it can't really be called a documentary. And though it has a narrative—described by the opening titles as "a science fiction fantasy"—it is in no way a traditional one.

The story is self-evidently not meant to be taken at face value, as is the case with most science fiction. Let me explain. The Wild Blue Yonder has one actor—the always-adorable Brad Dourif—portraying an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. While standing in front of bleak terrestrial settings (like a seemingly abandoned town and a mobile home apparently hit by a tornado), Dourif explains—to the camera—how his people came to this planet, how the government launched a secret expedition into the far reaches of space in search of an alternative to Earth, and how this expedition discovered Dourif's homeworld. His exposition is overlaid with appropriately otherworldly footage from a space shuttle mission and from an Antarctic diving expedition, along with occasional snippets of interviews with astronomers.

Review: Riddick

The new third Riddick movie (titled Riddick, as if it's an album or something) is in my view a step backward for the franchise, despite its effectiveness at pitting scary monsters against rough space thugs. I'm a real fan of the Riddick character and both of the previous films, but this new one is problematic, and the essence of its problems is that, in trying to be more like the first film and less like the second, the character's growth is stunted, and the stakes of the story with it.

Review: Dredd

In Dredd, a futuristic cop/jury/executioner/JUDGE with the improbable name of Dredd takes a psychic rookie under his wing—and into a deadly fortress controlled by vicious killers who are somewhat reluctant to allow the judges to escape alive. Surrounded on all sides by death, they're about to discover that the only thing they can count on…is each other. And bullets. Thousands and thousands of bullets.

I'm by no means a comic book nerd, or even dilettante. This means that, though I've long been aware of Judge Dredd's graphic-novel origins, my personal understanding of the character is limited to the Stallone version and a few glimpses of the scowling comic version of Dredd. Casting-wise, Karl Urban's definitely an improvement; his scowl is more consistent and believable than Stallone's…pout? grimace? Let's just say "Stallone-face."

Review: The Mist

Based on a Stephen King novella, The Mist is a skillful and gripping monster/horror flick directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) that you should definitely see if you fall into any of the following categories:

you are familiar with, and enjoy, the "survival horror" genre

you like Stephen King's style (e.g. small town in Maine, every minor character is known by name to every other minor character, families in crisis due to monsters, etc.)

…and especially if

you like a really great fuck-you ending.

I've mentioned the fuck-you ending on this blog before. The fuck-you ending is the wonderful device whereby the filmmakers craft the story such that the audience thinks "Well, they can't POSSIBLY end the movie THAT way," and then they go ahead and do it. Drag Me to Hell had a very apt fuck-you ending in which a major character, well, justifies the movie's title.

Review: Pacific Rim

If you've ever said to yourself, "I enjoy Godzilla movies for their camp value, but why hasn't anyone ever made a more realistic one, with modern special effects?", then you obviously weren't paying attention in 1998 when the execrable Godzilla remake starring Matthew Broderick came out. However, you're in luck, hypothetical monster movie aficionado, because Guillermo del Toro made Pacific Rim just for you, and you'll be satisfied by it. The rest of us will have more mixed feelings.

Pacific Rim is undeniably effective at doing what it sets out to do: make huge robots punch huge monsters and make it look awesome and believable. My giggles of enjoyment occurred during these scenes, which demonstrate skillful design, flawless digital imagery, and imaginative storyboarding. Unfortunately—in this age when special effects are no longer special, but expected—it needed to do more than that to win over that segment of the audience who DOESN'T enjoy Godzilla movies for their camp value, represented by a couple guys we overheard leaving the theater, one of whom said "Well, that was the stupidest movie I've seen in a long time."

Review: Cosmopolis

I did like the music. Gotta say that right up front. There wasn't enough of it, but what was there, I liked. It contributed to the intermittently dreamlike mood.

But otherwise? Cosmopolis is a pretentious mess, a string of disjointed scenes whose purpose feel less like narrative advancement and more like "let's bring in this actor now." The thematic continuity, such as it is, tries to seem like it's got its "finger on the pulse" of contemporary American issues like class warfare, sexual politics, and crazed lone gunmen. But if educators in future generations decide this movie represents our time, then I feel bad for the students forced to watch it.

Maybe my vitriol is partly due to the concept's inherent appeal and potential. Cosmopolis concerns a brilliant and amoral young Wall Street bazillionaire whose financial empire begins to collapse all around him while he spends most of the movie in his borderline-sci-fi limo surrounded by riots. AND it's directed in a sterile, sleek fashion by David Friggin' Cronenberg. I can imagine a universe where I love the shit out of that movie.

Review: Dark City

And now, another one from my "I Put It Off So Long that It's Probably a Little Past Its Freshness Date" movie pile.

The prospective viewer should know that Dark City is not so much a noir film (despite its visual palette) as it is a mysterious sci-fi/fantasy film. That sentence probably gives away too much, but a fan of noir who dislikes films that delve too deeply into the realm of the fantastical will be disappointed with Dark City. However, the inverse is also true; I'm only mildly fond of noir but I liked Dark City more than either true noir or Dark City-esque films like The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix.

Structurally, the film reveals just enough at just the right times to maintain the right balance of interest and confusion. Had it tried to be more opaque—for example, had it omitted the shot of the weird creature during one of the early chase scenes—it might have kept me from guessing as much about the explanation as I did, but it also might have turned out too plodding.

Review: Timestalkers

This is a fun one for all the sci-fi nerds out there. Just let me emphasize that, by "fun," I don't mean "good."

Timestalkers is a cheesy 1987 made-for-TV movie about a history professor and Old West hobbyist (William Devane, almost completely miscast) who, after the death of his wife and son (the boy from Who's the Boss), finds himself recruited by a time-travelling fashion model (Lauren Hutton, sadly wearing a cap over her tooth-gap) to help her stop the assassination of some 19th century person to further the vague career goals of her deranged, homicidal ex-colleague (Klaus Kinski, looking like Doc Brown's psycho brother).

Kinski and Hutton alternately employ unnecessarily gaudy time-travel technology to make the plot appear to develop. Even before this, however, we are treated to "flashbacks" from Devane's antiquing road trips that depict what Kinski is (simultaneously?) doing in the Old West. The part that's by turns endearing and irritating is that each flashback is accompanied by an explosive screen effect and the stolen sound of a TIE fighter cannon firing.

Review: The Terminators

Every time I start one of these obviously-terrible titles on Netflix Instant, I battle with a sense of dread, asking myself "Am I about to waste an hour-plus of my life?" In the case of The Terminators, I'm happy to respond to myself, "Not entirely," mainly because they had the good sense to cast A Martinez.

For those of you who think that's a typo, A Martinez is his actual screen name. He's a well-known soap actor, and was on One Life to Live during the short cluster of years that my wife was following the show. His acting style has always been understated and detached in a kind of tough-guy fashion, and it's even more the case in The Terminators—yet not carrying the undercurrent of boredom you might expect from a real actor, like Martinez, reflecting on his presence in an Asylum movie. It's frankly a bizarre performance, but intentionally so, and I'm giving The Terminators a whole half-star just for the fact that his cop character turns out to be an android. It's a pretty well-handled reveal in a film of this calibre, and it's quite nice to see a real actor make a deliberate acting choice like that in the sort of movie where deliberate acting choices are infrequent.