Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 34

The Polar Express
A boy and a group of children ride a fantastical train to the North Pole. This was the first movie ever to use all-digital motion capture, which made for realistic movements in the animated human characters. I’m not quite into that type of CGI—I didn’t like it when Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 did it, especially, because the movements seem almost human, but just slightly too stiff and slow—the uncanny valley. Anyways, the story itself was good, even just because it was outside of the Pixar arc formula. There was a missed opportunity with Holly/Hero Girl. She featured strongly throughout most of the movie, and she was supposed to be learn “leadership,” but she had barely any character growth.

Halo Infinite (video game)
Master Chief, with a new AI and a stray UNSC pilot, land on Halo Zeta to fight the Banished and their leader, Escharum. There was a lot that went on here, and reading about what the campaign was about before the game’s release, I expected the story to be more of an unfortunate side quest of Master Chief having to deal with the fallout of Halo 5, with Cortana achieving rampancy, infecting all of the other AIs, and using the Guardians to shut everything down. So in a sense, I expected him to not deal with Cortana directly, but landing somewhere (which happened) and having to fight a random Covenant faction (which happened, but not Covenant) and get back to the UNSC and continue the main quest—basically, the story not moving forward. Fortunately, the story did move forward, though not as much as I had liked. I’d like to think the Xalanyn/Endless will end up being allies to the humans instead of yet another enemy. The Harbinger made a deal with Atriox didn’t seem to care much about anything except freeing the the other Xalanyn from Halo Zeta, and repairing Zeta was the only way to do it. It’s just that Master Chief and Co. were in the way (I think she actually said John wasn’t an enemy of hers). I like to the think the Xalanyn have it in for the Forerunners because they imprisoned them, and they would see the Covenant races as enemies since they worship the Forerunners (sort of) when they are freed. Who knows? The humans need some firepower on their side to get rid of all of those Guardians.

Redline
Sweet JP enters the illegal Redline race held on the planet Roboworld. Goodness gracious, this film wore me out with its animation, which reportedly was produced with 100,000 hand-drawn frames—no CGI. Though, “hand-drawn” can have multiple meanings. Likely, it was all digitally created, but there were no CGI models used. Either way, it’s really something to look at. The minimal story was just enough to put some logic around the ridiculous racing scenes. It actually takes some writing skill to not overburden a science fiction universe with exposition, and to make what exposition you do have tangible and sensible. The story itself I didn’t care for. It was a Madhouse film, and the director, Takeshi Koike, worked on other Madhouse films, like all of Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s gross stuff. Nihilism and corruption are rather overplayed after a decade of nearly censorship-free video streaming.

EarthBound (video game)
You might’ve heard this one before: a boy in middle America finds a meteorite crashed behind his house and has to fight against the evil force that came with it. This is the sequel to Mother, and it’s essentially the same story but in a different part of the world. There’s still a lot of the mundane, eventually turning into the fantastical, settings, and the same off-beat humor. I never played this, or even heard of it, when I was knee-deep in the 16-bit RPG era as it was happening, but the story got a lot of praise. I didn’t find it as compelling or profound as the great three that I attached to: Final Fantasy III/VI, Secret of Mana, and Chrono Trigger, though I think if I played it back then, I would’ve liked it more.

Replicas
A biologist clones and revives his family after they die in a car accident. This had a few good ideas, like the entire ordeal with having to make sure their memories work properly, but that was the only really salvagable about this movie. Keanu Reeves probably owed someone a favor, like with Jack Palance appearing in Hawk, the Slayer. He doesn’t owe anyone alimony, so it’s not for the money. Keanu is considered one of the few openly no-nonsense/good guys in Hollywood, so I want to think he did this as a goodwill gesture for someone. As the kids like to say, that’s my headcanon for the situation.

Treasure Planet
Treasure Island, but in space. I don’t know how well it stacked up against the source material because I never read it (still in my to-read pile), but this was your typical Don Bluth movie that was really just a Disney movie and had nothing to do with Bluth. The B.E.N. robot character was fun to watch, and the protagonist’s substitute father figure had some character depth to him. There was always some doubt as to whether he was being genuine or not, or whether he would redeem himself by the conclusion. Holographic books, too.

Aliens
Ellen Ripley, recovered from stasis after escaping the Nostromo, teams up with a squad of colonial space marines to investigate why the transmissions from the colony on LV-426 have stopped. The consummate sci-fi action film, on the level of Back to the Future in terms of how well it was executed—I may have watched this up to 100 times when I was in middle school. Halo and other gaming franchises wouldn’t be around, or at least would’ve turned out much different, without this movie. For a while I thought the marines acted a bit too uncharacteristically unprofessional, with Vasquez and Drake directly disobeying orders in battle, albeit from a CO they didn’t respect at all, and Hudson freaking out all the time. I think of it a little different now, though, because they are coming across horrid and terrorizing alien animals for the first time. A lot of people might snap, regardless of how well they are trained. Ripley and Newt are especially good here, and their character and actions are very much in keeping with their histories. Ripley is a traumatized blue collar worker: she knows how to handle the dock loaders, not pulse rifles…though she learns some things later on that help. Newt is a 7 (?) year old girl having to live among a hive of aliens creatures that murdered her family and everyone in the colony, and she acts like it: she runs, hides, learns to not make a sound. Modern depictions of their character types would be much different, and unbelievable.

Jonah Hex
A disfigured civil war vet who can make dead men tell tales has to stop the man who killed his family from acquiring and using WMDs. This was not well received at all. I thought it was okay, but I don’t know anything about the original comic book character. At the very least, the runtime was not long, at only 81 minutes. When Jonah visits an ex-slave to peruse his steampunky armory, the lays guy down some really obvious As You Know trope dialog, telling Jonah that he, Jonah, despite fighting for the Confederate army, support neither slavery nor the secession. Because we can’t have audiences rooting for that kind of protagonist, could we? The effort to sort out the discomfort would rise to painful levels.

Battleship
Aliens sea ships invade earth. This was supposed to be loosely based on the Battleship board game, the electronic version of which my son and I play often, but there really wasn’t any link to be found. They didn’t even include the “you sunk my battleship line!” which I was 100% sure was going to happen, so in that sense they at least evaded a bit of corny dialogue. In all, the movie was not at all good, but I will say the design of the aliens’ ships, weaponry, and EVA suits was really well done. There’s a tendency in these films to depict alien tech as very precise, minimalist, and “clean.” Like in Firefly, this stuff is a little bulky, worn, and inexact.

Above Majestic
A documentary, exposing Nazi technology, Trump’s uncle recovering Tesla’s inventions, the 35,000 some-odd sealed indictments, Antarctic military bases, lizard people, central banking, the Kennedy assassination, the Rothschilds, moon bases, who knows what else. Always with the damn Nazis. Notably, one of the disturbingly deadpan talking heads that you always see in these types of documentaries invoked the electric universe theory—the most reasonable concept found in this entire thing. It was all pretty fascinating stuff in my view, though it was mostly bad (actual) conspiracy theories pumped out by QAnon-adjacent controlled opposition swill-shills.