Science Fiction - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Battleship’

Let’s get this out of the way, right up front: we all know “Battleship” is preposterously based on a plotless, characterless board game that involves yelling out random letters and numbers, so to expect a good movie out of this would seem to be a fool’s errand. With the whole thing reeking of “cashing in,” thanks to the ridiculous financial success of another film franchise based on a toyline, maybe it doesn’t even need to be said that “Battleship” is a dumb, spectacle-first, story-last, explosion laden, typical summer hunk of crap of the first order. But then again, who said it had to be this way?

Though Battleship: the Board Game is itself a truly iconic game, spanning generations and entertaining everyone with it’s simple yet addictive mechanics, there really is very little about the game that one would expect in a feature film. There’s the grid structure and guessing dynamic of the game, and the catch phrase “You sunk my battleship,” and that’s it. So theoretically, it would actually be pretty simple to come up with a naval based story that somehow incorporates these elements, and on paper, Peter Berg and writers Jon and Erich Hoeber’s approach of using an alien menace as the antagonists is fairly brilliant, allowing them to come up with alien technology in their story that would necessitate the use of the board game’s well known game play and also giving them plenty of room to come up with their own characters and story arcs; with such a blank slate to work with, these guys really could have told any story they wanted to, all dressed up in the guise of blockbuster entertainment.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Apollo 18’

The “found footage” mockumentary genre has been going surprisingly strong since “The Blair Witch Project” popularized the filmmaking style in the 1990’s, and it was only a matter of time before the genre found its way into outer space. In what might be the first totally lunar-based horror film, “Apollo 18” purports to be an assemblage of discovered NASA footage detailing a secret Moon mission and revealing the apparent horrors that have prevented humans from returning.

Three astronauts go up in Apollo 18 in a secret mission to plant little radars for the Department of Defense, apparently to help keep an eye on Soviet missiles that might come their way. Once at the moon, John Grey (Ryan Robbins, AVPR: Aliens vs Predator – Requiem) stays in the spacecraft in orbit, and the lunar module is taken down by Ben Anderson (Warren Christie, Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation) and Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles). After they touch down, Anderson and Walker set on their two-day mission to install the DoD radars and motion sensor cameras, though they never explain why these cameras are installed (obviously it’s so we can have a movie in the first place, but still, they never explain it and the astronauts don’t question it). Very quickly, these two guys discover that something is a little strange on the surface of the moon, and the cameras catch little glimpses of movement here and there, and it’s a slow burn to the gradual reveal of what’s really going on.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Another Earth’

“Another Earth” is one of those little indie films that comes out of the film festival circuit with lots of buzz and good will and jury prize awards and what not, so by the time it hits the multiplexes (if it does at all), it’s already positioned as the new great film from some exciting new voices in cinema. Which makes it disappointing when the movie actually turns out to be kinda crappy, because if it were viewed without all of that positive word of mouth, then maybe it would have just been seen as an okay movie and a solid debut from an interesting young filmmaker. But instead, since it was positioned as the next Solaris or 2001: A Space Odyssey, expectations became too high and it gains extra scrutinization, and unfortunately “Another Earth” doesn’t hold up under the scrutiny.

“Another Earth” is the story of a 17-year old high school graduate named Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling, who also co-wrote the story), and the movie starts with her celebrating her acceptance into MIT, which shows she’s a very smart person with lots of potential and promise. Rhoda immediately throws all of this potential and promise out of the window when she goes drunk driving after her celebration and ends up plowing into another car, putting a successful composer named John Burroughs (William Mapother, Mission: Impossible 2) into a coma and killing his young son and pregnant wife. Jump cut to four years later with Rhoda getting out of prison. She takes a job at her old high school as a janitor, she secludes herself from just about everyone else, and she sets out to make amends with John the composer. But when she goes to his home to apologize to him, she loses her nerve and makes up a story about being from a maid service, offering a free trial. And John, who is apparently now a drunkard and suffering from some brain damage, allows Rhoda into his home to clean.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Cowboys & Aliens’

Just look at that title – “Cowboys & Aliens.” Going into this movie, everyone knew it would be a tough one to pull off. The mixing of the very grounded and dusty Western genre with the fantastic, more imaginative aspects of science fiction writing doesn’t make for a smooth pairing. Some massaging and elbow grease has to be used to make these two genres come together in an entertaining and coherent fashion. And while “Cowboys & Aliens” does come close to nailing this concept, it does fall short, and probably would have been much better without the aliens at all.

The set up is simple. The movie opens in the middle of the desert, in which a gunslinger with amnesia (Daniel Craig) wakes up injured and wanders into the nearest town. When he gets there, he finds out that he’s a stagecoach robber and murderer and the law takes him in. But before he can be processed, here comes an alien invasion, blowing up the town and lassoing away people from the streets and into their little aircrafts. So our amnesiac stagecoach robbing gunfighter hero teams up with the local dickhead cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) to form a posse and track down the aliens in an effort to save the people that were kidnapped. Oh, and Daniel Craig has some sort of ridiculous alien wrist gun the whole time.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Star Trek Beyond’

“Star Trek Beyond” is the third Star Trek movie with this particular iteration of the original crew of the USS Enterprise (quite possibly one of the most famous fake vehicles ever), which started with the 2009 reboot “Star Trek,” a reimagining of these iconic characters as younger and less experiences, embarking on their first missions, tested immediately by evil space forces of various sorts, bringing them closer together as a crew, etc. etc., you know the drill. If you aren’t on board with these movies by now, this one is not likely to change your mind.

On the flip side, if you do like these movies, you’ll likely really dig this newest installment because it is simultaneously a fun movie while also having some big stakes and featuring a villain, despite being a bad guy, still makes some sense when he discusses his reasoning for his actions. There are jokes, action scenes, a bit of a plot twist, and it all looks pretty, which all comes together to make for a fine piece of summer entertainment.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Independence Day: Resurgence’

“Independence Day: Resurgence” is a sequel to the biggest hit of 1996, and Roland Emmerich and (most of the) crew from that original aliens versus humans blockbuster went with the good old mantra of “bigger means better,” which means everything is bigger in this movie. The ships, the aliens, the threat, all of it, which makes sense because Emmerich spent the intervening two decades destroying the planet in bigger (though not necessarily better) ways over and over, and here he takes all of those huge and ludicrous scenes and ideas that defy nature and physics and he pushes the throttle forward and adds those aliens and boom, yet another nostalgia fueled blast to the past, another return to a beloved 1990’s movie, another couple of hours with both familiar icons from another movie and some fresh young faces of today, all encompassed by more CGI than you could shake a selfie-stick at.

But was it worth it?

Nope.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Hardcore Henry’

It was only a matter of time before we got our first ever first-person point of view action movie, and now that it is here in the form of “Hardcore Henry,” we have another example of all the gimmicks and stunts in the world not being able to make up for a complete lack of interesting story or characters. Not to say “Hardcore Henry” is a total waste of time, as it is an impressive technical feat of a movie, but when it is all said and done, it is also surprisingly boring.

Since the movie’s perspective is 100% from that of the main character, we learn about the other characters in the movie as the story progresses. Well “story” is a loose term used to describe the series of objectives given to Henry so he can move from scene to scene, all in an attempt to rescue his wife and also his inventor Estelle (J-Law lookalike Haley Bennett) from the clutches of some white-haired weirdo named Akan (Danila Kozlovsky) who has telekinetic powers that I am pretty sure are never explained at any point. When the movie starts, Henry “wakes up” in a lab and sees Estelle putting him together and she tries to explain to him what is going on, but before he gets the full story, they are attacked by this Akan fella and his goons, she is eventually kidnapped, and Henry finds himself meeting up with a guy named Jimmy (Sharlto Copley) who tries to help Henry along the way.

Review: ‘Midnight Special’

“Midnight Special” is the latest evolution from writer/director Jeff Nichols, whose movies have slowly yet surely gotten a little bigger and a little more ambitious as he grows as an artist. Here he ventures into some science fiction territory to tell a story about faith and religion, but also about a father and son, and while having huge implications, this is still in many ways a small indie thriller road movie, just with a couple of bigger scenes thrown in for good measure.

Right when the movie starts, everyone is looking for an 8-year old boy named Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). He’s a special kid with some sort of powers, and he’s being tracked down by both the government and a cultish group living in a place simply called The Ranch. Taking him from a small town in Texas to a mysterious location is his father Roy (Michael Shannon) and Roy’s old friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), and they are taking numerous seemingly cumbersome precautions in transporting this kid until you find out why they are doing what they do. This is the kind of movie that works in a lot of ambiguity and mystery and takes its time to explain things, even then only doing so with just enough information without being burdensome, still leaving enough up in the air to get the imagination to fill in some of the little gaps.

Review: ‘Embers’

“Embers” is thought-provoking science fiction, a mystery with no easy answers, and an accomplished film from a director making a feature-length movie debut. Everyone has lost the ability to make or retain memories, which makes you wonder how society would function in such a scenario? Would it even function? What do people do if they can’t remember anything? How can we even exist as people if we can’t remember who we are, or even why we are?

These are big questions, and “Embers” takes the best way to approach them, with small stories focused on a handful of characters. Instead of trying to portray an entire world grappling with this situation as it goes down (that would be the Roland Emmerich version of this movie), it is about a decade after it has all gone down, after a virus causes everyone to forget everything on a day to day basis, and we see how different people survive even a day in this horrible world. Because yes of course society can’t function and everything has broken down and people are forced to literally sift through the rubble.

Review: ’10 Cloverfield Lane’

According to producer JJ Abrams, “10 Cloverfield Lane” is not a direct sequel to the 2008 found footage monster movie called “Cloverfield,” but instead is hopefully the beginning of a series of movies that will fall under a Cloverfield-themed banner, essentially an anthology of genre movies that will be similar in spirit and tone to each other but will be different stories going in different directions. Like “The Twilight Zone” or “Tales From The Crypt,” the word Cloverfield will theoretically start to mean something more to people than just “giant monster.” And with “10 Cloverfield Lane,” it appears that they have started this journey of a thousand miles with the proper first steps.

The cool thing about “10 Cloverfield Lane” is how the story and plot are both quite small and contained to a single set and only a few characters, but the scope of the movie ends up being pretty epic. It’s actually a great example of how a movie can give an audience just enough so that they can make bigger leaps with their imaginations, wondering how the details provided actually continue to extend throughout this world logically. We don’t need to actually see the full picture, just give a few smartly chosen details and let the audience do the rest.