Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 39

The Adam Project
A pilot on the run in 2050 steals a time-traveling plane and jumps to the past to meet himself at 12 years old. You’d be forgiven in thinking it’s really annoying that Ryan Reynolds plays Deadpool in every movie, because we value versatility in acting. But no one else would be able to play Deadpool when he’s done, so he’s leaving a mark that no one will be able to erase in later years. Zoe Saldana also plays Gamora in every other thing I’ve seen her in, so that’s any better. Interesting that the main antagonist is a unathletic, middle-aged businesswoman. One huge huge huge coincidence I can’t get past is that Adam just so happens to crash land in the woodsy backyard of his childhood house. There was no indication or explanation anywhere where there were physical coordinates establish in his purloined plane, though we know Adam intended to go back to 2018, not 2022. He didn’t know why Laura went back to 2018, so he couldn’t have known where she landed geographically. And for some reason the official story was that she “burned up during re-entry”…in 2050 or 2018? If it was 2050, how would she have known that was the reason given why she was gone? Adam would know it, but if he did, why did he go back when he knew she was dead? It seems like a few lines of explanatory dialog are missing, if the writers even figured that out at all.

The Colony (2021)
From a contingent of humans in orbit around a Kepler-209 exoplanet, an astronaut arrives to a badly-damaged earth to see if it can be repopulated. Also titled Tides. Waterworld meets, I don’t know, probably Children of Men. Much can be said about the set design and cinematography, since it makes you so uncomfortable about the state of how people are living in the situation; one feels palpable relief when the protagonist finally is able to take a decent shower. There were a few minor spots where the science didn’t quite add up, in reading some of the reviews, where in other spots people like to just harp for no reason. There’s a big difference between autistic nitpicking and making up for the writer’s laziness. Every movie in the world provides enough unexplained things for both scenarios, where this one only had a few things for the latter. Does it matter that it’s not explained how the mud people were able to start a fire, or how they had rain ponchos? They were lifelong scavengers, and all that crap will still be around for 40 years after a flood disaster. It was good to see, after watching Exception, astronauts in a last-ditch colonizing effort act like they should. There’s a clear chain of command being followed, the mission is top priority, and they brought firearms into an unknown situation. Thank you! The villains were easily spotted (white dudes in power), one of them commits sexual assault on camera, while the other one is obsessed with captive-female fertility. This stuff, especially the assault thing, is the ketchup of story-telling: cheap, easy to apply, gets the job done, and you know how it’s gonna end up. I do have a recommended change. Switch the fertility-obsessed mission leader with Blake (the protagonist’s) dad. Dad becomes the head of the refuge, and hey…why is Gibson, on of your reporting officers, in the brig? Oh, he lead the rebellion but I didn’t have the heart to kill him. We still have our mission to complete, after all. When Blake learns her dad is trafficking girls and Gibson was the one who tried to free them, Blake has to choose between her dad, who’s now a jerk, and repopulating the Earth (sort of their mission), and freeing innocent people who might also be able to repopulate the planet outside of the prison. Two equally good/bad choices.

Angels & Demons
As a papal enclave commences, the Vatican calls upon a Harvard professor to solve the murder of a physicist, and to stop a possible terrorist threat. Imagine being invited into someone’s home, after you had badmouthed the owners to everyone, and then criticizing their house to the other guests and right to the owners’ faces themselves. And going in their wine cellar to steal a bottle of one of their most expensive wines. That’s kind of what the protagonist does here. You’d think a Harvard guy would be smart enough not to act a fool in the home turf of an apparatus (the Catholic Church) that could easily have him erased and his academic work discredited, so it seems like he knows he knows he’s wearing major plot armor. Dan Brown, the author of the book on which this movie is based, got nearly every historical fact wrong in one of his other books, The da Vinci Code, so I’m going to assume most of the “facts” proposed here are garbage as well. Brown explicitly claimed The da Vinci Code was entirely factual, though, and I don’t know if he made the same claim about Angels & Demons, but let’s assume he’s stupid enough to do that. The protagonist repeats the Draper-White thesis, the old, tired lie that the Catholic church and science were historically in opposition, and it’s used as motivation for different characters, so if Brown was going for genuine history he already screwed it up. The Illuminati features heavily here, too, so we can conclude Brown got that all wrong. Maybe a lot of the Vatican City landmarks were accurate? Who knows. I do like the fact that the protagonist failed to save three of the captured cardinals; successfully rescuing all of them would be a little too perfect, and Langford already comes across as a Marty Stu. Really wanted this line to be written in: “You guys gotta decide on a pope soon. It’s the Vatican, not the Vatican’t!” But this is sadly not that kind of movie.

Green Lantern
A rogue fighter pilot is selected to join the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic police force. This was a standard superhero movie, but a lot of people didn’t like it. I like the oversaturated colors and dodgy CGI; it made you feel like you were watching a comic book movie and not a typical space action movie. I like the idea of the Green Lantern Corp, though I know next to nothing about any of their source material. It just feels like a lot of good story potential. Looking at a bit of the lore, there’s a “Green Lantern” Corpsman (you’ll see why I put that in quotes) named Rot Lop Fan. His species lacks vision, so the idea of a “lantern,” and the rings’ powers themselves have no meaning to him. All of his powers are sound-oriented. He has a bell insignia on his uniform and refers to the team as the “F-Sharp Bell Corps,” because the note is pleasing to his species. I don’t know if he’s depicted extensively in the comics, but I find the idea of his character’s situation interesting. I would have given him a wildly complex and unpronounceable name. If sound is his peoples’ primary way of experiencing the universe, it makes sense that their created words and names would be finely tuned (snicker) and detailed to that kind of epistemology. “Rot Lop Fan” could just be a nickname for seeing-eye beings to call him.

Million Dollar Baby
A grumpy old gym owner reluctantly trains an enthusiastic but unskilled boxing protégé. This one didn’t turn out as you might expect for a boxing movie because Clint Eastwood directed it. I think it was probably Back to the Future and a few others around that time, that really set the shape of most modern Hollywood stories: BttF is a “Man in a Hole” story, while Million Dollar Baby is a tragic “Old Testament.” Lots of extreme shadows and light: half-lit faces, silhouettes, darkened rooms and environments where people are doing things that require a decent amount of illumination. I don’t know about filmmaking enough to know what those visuals are supposed to symbolize. Maybe it’s nothing more than a stylistic choice. I’ve also no idea about good or bad acting, but once in a while I can really parse one from the other. To wit, it honestly didn’t seem to me like Hilary Swank was acting at all, but was a normal person living her life in places where cameras happened to be filming, so I suppose she played her part really well. I genuinely felt bad for her in the end, but that’s what happens when unbelievable bad luck happens to someone so relentlessly positive and guiltless. I read some “analyses” that said it’s implied Clint Eastwood’s character, Frankie, killed himself after he did Maggie in, because there were two syringes: one for her and him. Not only did I not see two syringes anywhere (maybe because of the aforementioned unorthodox lighting scheme and shadows), but it was also implied—more heavily, in my view—that Frankie returned to that one diner near Maggie’s childhood home and bought it. There was a reason why it was emphasized earlier on, and maybe why diners in general were featured so heavily. Lots of pointing fingers. The diner getaway conclusion would align somewhat with the Keats lines he read to her in the hospital, about going to a cabin in the woods. That doesn’t scream “suicide” to me, so I have no idea what the other mysterious second syringe should symbolize.

EDIT: Alright, I don’t know why I didn’t bother to search for the two syringe idea, but I just did, and there definitely were two syringes shown in an obvious manner. So it begs the question: what does it mean? A clever idiot who takes movies completely literally would say Frankie brings two syringes in case the first one doesn’t work; he’s being thorough. I’ll file that explanation away under the “characters in movies think as reasonably and objectively as I do, unless the screenwriter doesn’t know what he’s doing” section of the solipsism folder, which is getting pretty full these days. I won’t bother supplying any further arguments against that. A more reasonable person would say the second syringe is for Frankie’s own suicide, but Frankie being at all suicidal or even really mentioning death wasn’t a seed planted earlier in the narrative. Though a case can be made for that, I’m not about to call Clint Eastwood an incompetent storyteller. The most reasonable explanation is that the other syringe symbolizes Frankie killing his old life and making a new one at Maggie’s hometown diner. It closes off and “explains” much of the popcorn trail dropped from earlier scenes. I suppose you could invert things and propose that all of Frankie’s talk about abandoning his old life and the stuff with Keats was the symbolic part and the syringe/suicide was literal, but that feels like an overcomplication. I think people sometimes just want to have that darker ending, because everything is darker nowadays. With that matter settled, here’s where I excuse my inattention to this important visual detail of the two syringes. I’ve said before that most movies don’t allow the viewer to stop and think, partially for good reasons I won’t get into here. But even for the good reasons, most modern movies don’t comport well with how I think, which is not quick at all. I’ll sometimes retract my conscious attention from the movie, fixate on something I see or hear and pursue tangents about it. The movie has moved on to the next narrative beat and I’m zoned out, a scene or two behind. And I’m not about to pause the movie so I can complete my stupid mental adventure; it would annoy me to artificially halt a real-time medium, even if I were the only viewer in the room. That’s not a humblebrag explanation to portray myself as particularly smart (I’m not), or intensely, quietly profound (lol), a “deep” thinker (heaven help us, no). It’s merely a method of going about things.

A King’s Tale: Final Fantasy XV (video game)
King Regis of Lucis tells his son, Noctis, a bedtime story about his pursuit of a thief who stole a nameless crystal. Final Fantasy XV and the associated spin-off games in the Eos universe, as far as I know, have all the same type of gameplay. A brawler game would break the genre. Looking at the Final Fantasy wiki and some other pages, the story the Lucis tells actually happened, but the gameplay itself is a depiction of his embellishments as he tells it. I don’t think the stolen crystal is the one that powers Insomnia, the capital city, because that would cause a lot of issues that didn’t happen. I would think they would mention if it was that one, regardless. Either way, this is an interesting way to release a side-scrolling fighting game that wouldn’t fit into the established lore of the universe.

Resident Evil
A woman with amnesia accompanies an elite commando force as they break into the Umbrella Corporation’s Hive, inside which a deadly pathogen has been released. A different take on the typical zombie story. It’s weird in pseudo sci-fi movies how research facilities tend to look like nightclubs or experimental art installations. I haven’t been into any top secret building in my life but I know they probably look as boring as my porch in winter. Another weird thing: why would a special forces type of team swarm a specific part of a facility where a known asset literally takes showers, eats, sleeps, takes dumps? They didn’t seem to have bad intel, because the commanding officer immediately asked her for a report, and handcuffed the dude that (they thought) was assaulting her—they expected her to be there. Discretion with deadly force it too much to ask for, I guess. I liked that the avatar of the facility’s AI, the Red Queen, was a young British girl, and not some menacing monarch as her name suggests. Horror movies have a weird thing with featuring kids in their plot, so maybe I should’ve expected it.

The Day After Tomorrow
As a new ice age hits the earth, a climatologist goes to rescue his son who is stranded in New York City. This is basically a Disappeared Dad redemption story wrapped up in a corny climate change propaganda taco shell. Elysium was the same way for Obamacare but at least that story wasn’t too bad. The mom was a busybee doctor, so it’s not like she was the responsible one. You also get a kid with brain cancer and reverse America-into-Mexico illegal immigration for bonus empathy and guilt. There was a lot of science-babble that even mainstream scientists said was nonsense. Huge huge huge coincidence in the beginning, where the ice core drilling team is in the exact spot in the exact moment the part of the ice shelf starts to break apart. It wasn’t even necessary to the plot, so that coincidence was wasted in a big way. That dramatic jump and cliff edge-dangle had to happen, I guess. The writers get props for including that one guy in the science war room scene where he says “the sun controls the weather,” though he was pretty much ignored. There’s a rich, elite high school Chad who catches the eye of the simp’s love interest, but the Chad turns out to be friendly and helpful. There’s really terrible ways to subvert expectations in stories, and there are effective ones. Friendly High School Chad is the latter.

JUNG_E
A scientist attempts to clone the brain of her mother, a supersoldier killed in action, to help end the war between earth-orbiting space stations. No one liked this because: 1) the pacing dragged in the beginning of the second act, where there was too much repetition with the research and experimentation, 2) it wanted to be a comedy, or a hard science-fiction story, or a war story, or an action sci-fi story, and 3) people expected a big battle at the end that never came. It had the potential for a good hard sci-fi story, which is what I prefer out of that list, and JUNG_E was probably closest to that subgenre to begin with. I would have made the protagonist’s (Yun Seo-hyun’s) relationship to the soldier a secret, and revealed near the climax when she frees her mother from the experiments and from being turned into a Type-C corporate asset. She would have kept her identity a secret from everyone else, too; when there’s a huge war at stake, it strains credulity to think a high-profile scientist directly experimenting on her mother wouldn’t be counted as a huge conflict of interest. The mother-daughter reveal would happen right at the scene where she gives her cloned mother the subliminal message. You could rig the story, too, so that Yun, as a compassionate scientist, paradoxically wants the war to continue to both honor her mother’s legacy and to redeem herself, while the chairman wants a practical, everyday use for the clones. It would invert the trope of the “bureaucrat wants war, scientist wants peace” character goals.

The Black Hole
An space-faring team finds a spaceship manned by an AWOL captain, hovering near a black hole. A family-friendly 2001 meets Apocalypse Now, maybe? I feel like Disney was trying to cash in on the sudden interest in robots from Star Wars, which is why the three main robots were heavily featured here. Even the crew were robotified in a sense. You could say Event Horizon was a remake of this movie, though the extremely not family-friendly Event Horizon was the superior film. In my mind, I compare The Black Hole too much to The Forbidden Planet—which was also a much superior story— and The Black Hole fails especially in the realism department. The crew of the Palomino acted like a family on a roadtrip and didn’t have the discipline and seriousness that the crew from TFB had; when you watch that, you really feel like you’re watching men capable of living in space, assessing unknown terrains and situations competently, and making important decisions. One of the crew on the Palomino freaked out in the beginning and said “sorry” to the captain like he just spilled beer on his barcalounger and not endanger the safety of the crew. The doctor having ESP took me out of the science-fiction part of everything, but she wasn’t so overpowered that it became silly. Maybe ESP and mind control, etc., was a big interest in the 1970s that made the writers put that in there, and I think there was a missed opportunity to have her discover the true nature of the Cygnus’ crew. She could hear “whispers” of minds all around her when they board the Cygnus, and it confused her because the whispers felt human, but not completely, and Reinhardt was supposedly the only human on the ship. I can picture some bad scene where she absolutely insists there are other humans on board and won’t let it go, and Captain Durant gets so fed up with her feminine prodding that he smacks her silent. Not a Disney maneuver at all, though. Wonky effects, but I really liked the meteor in the tunnel scene in that regard, which probably freaked people out in the theaters in 1979.