Despite the fact that 30 years separate both Heijningen’s prequel and Carpenter’s remake, that intervening 30 years was not enough time for Universal to figure out what made the first 2 films into the classics that they are.

Unfortunately, Heijningen’s film pales in comparison to its predecessors because it’s producers not only forgot the nature of their Monster, but also its social relevance.

Campbell’s novella, like Hawks’ and Carpenter’s horror movies were classic Cold War stories. Like the Body Snatchers, Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies that preceded it, The Thing walked and talked like it’s human prey. The threat was that these Shape-shifters — Zombies, Vampires, Body Snatchers and Werewolves –  were capable of achieving sufficient numbers to exterminate mankind and overturn human civilization.

The remarkable failure of Heijningen’s film and Eric Heisserer’s screenplay is that it fails to co-opt our period anxieties the way that it’s precedents did. Way, way back in 2007, ST:TNG’s Ron Moore had successfully relaunched the 70s relic, Battlestar Galactica, as a post 9-11 allegory. Universal was hopeful that Moore might somehow make their Cold War relevant again, and paid him a tidy sum for a first draft.

I have no idea how Moore’s original screenplay fell down, but at some point Heijningen and his producers determined that Moore’s screenplay required a rewrite. Thus, we somehow ended up with a prequel that features the notorious Norwegian camp of Carpenter’s remake, but also two visiting American scientists and an African-American pilot that were somehow ‘unmentioned’ in Carpenter’s original film. In the movie’s PR materials they make a big deal about Heisserer working in the tall shadow Carpenter’s greatness.

“It’s a really fascinating way to construct a story because we’re doing it by autopsy […] we’re having to reverse engineer it, so those details all matter to us ‘cause it all has to make sense.”

– Eric Heisserer on writing The Thing (2011)

Yeah, whatever. The film’s greatest disappointment is it’s failure to capture the anxiety of our era. Hawks’ and Carpenter’s films appeared as book ends to the Cold War. Hawks’ film appeared just before Russia charged ahead with their Sputnik program. Carptenter’s film appeared only after Afghanistan had sent the Russians home,  their tails between their legs, and 2 years before Ronald Reagan demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev “Tear down this Wall”.

Given our post-9-11 anxieties about shoe-bombers, sleeper-agents and other terrorists, it should not have been a big stretch to fashion a paranoid tale of xenophobia down in the No-Man’s Land of Antarctica. In the years following 9-11, numerous production companies have tried — and failed — to bring back the alien invasion movie. Most regrettably, there was the Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig vehicle, ‘The Invasion’ (2007) a poor man’s remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. Then there was the  Cruise-Spielberg ‘War of the Worlds’ (2005). In both of these films, the star-power overwhelmed the plot, such that the end-product was paranoia without introspection, without emotional anxiety — the Cruise and Kidman never question their own motives or the systemic failure of the world around them, making the resulting movie almost entirely flaccid.

2011′s Thing has no stars and should therefore have been willing to make Red Shirts of the entire cast. No such luck –  the Norwegians (played by Norwegian actors, no less), are picked off like extras, while Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Who?), Joel Edgerton (Who?) and Ulrich Thomsen (What?) are left to hold down the Norwegian Camp from its internal, xenomorphic invader. May their sacrifice not have been in vain.

This Thing it is not so much of a prequel as much as a beat-for-beat recycling of Carpenter’s film. The effects may be better, but the plot is not.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Of course, it’s just the 3nd sequel to George Romero and John Russo’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)  but this film belongs to the dramedy fork of the franchise that Russo took when he and Romero went their separate ways.

Of course, RothLD 3 was written, directed and produced by ’80s low-budget schlockmeister and H.P. Lovecraft aficionado, Brian Yuzna. Unlike it’s predecessors, it abandons the full-on campy excesses of predecessors Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Lifeforce, Total Recall)  and Ken Wiederhorn to inject the tragic pathos of teenage romance into the mix, and somehow it works marvelously.
Melinda Clarke (CSI, Firefly, Nikita)plays the girlfriend who dies within the movie’s first 5 minutes. Devastated, her beau, Curt Reynolds (J. Trevor Edmond) sneaks onto the Top Secret military base where his father, Col. John Reynolds (Kent McCord) has been involved with the US Army’s experiments with the deadly, Zombie-activating Trioxin gas.

Given all of the OTT craziness, Yunza and Melinda Clarke really bring this one home. Between the script and the performance,  they create a devastating sympathy for Clarke’s tragic and slowly necrotizing Julie Walker. Clarke’s Walker really tries to go on with her life as though she never died, but the mortal coil fails her.

It’s Yunza’s triumph over a braindead horror-comedy formula that makes this film stand out. For a zombie flic, it’s not really about the brains or the eminent world-takeover; rather it’s about young people trying to separate themselves from their parent’s identity. For any movie aimed at the zombie teenage audiences of the early ’80s, this film is a major artistic achievement.

While this evacuate the Civil Rights-era messaging of the original Night of the Living Dead, Yuzna does a much better job of creating characters that we can actually care about. Beneath the surface of NothLD 3, there’s a simmering coming-of-age story as Curt tries to claim some autonomy from Col. John; it’s just too damn bad that death and zombies get in the way.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

The titles that stand out are as follow:

‘The Rite’ (January 28)
‘Captain America’ (July 22)
‘The Adjustment Bureau’ (March 4)
‘Thor’ (May 6)
‘X-Men: First Class’ (June 3)
‘Green Lantern’ (June 17)
‘Cowboys and Aliens’ (July 29)
‘Immortals’ (November 11)

Trailers are available on the Nerd Blerp site.

The coolest thing about the film is the hooded coat that Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) wears in the film’s third act after he leaves his remote hideaway beyond the edges of “the grid” and returns to digital society to confront Clu (a digitally de-aged Jeff Bridges) and what Clu’s desire for perfection has wrought in the system Flynn asked him to construct.  Black as the darkest night on the outside yet glowing with pure light from within, this garment is the perfect metaphor for the movie’s themes, and also the perfect representation of one of the things wrong with ‘Tron: Legacy:’  The film tries to do too much.

Beginning with a backstory meant to catch the audience up on the 18 years since the first film, ‘Legacy’ opens in 1989 with Kevin Flynn putting his 7 year-old son Sam (Owen Best) to bed before he heads off to work.  Senior Flynn’s stories of the digital world he’s creating with Clu and with Tron entrance young Sam even as his father promises to show him that world some time soon.  Quickly we learn not only of Flynn’s disappearance but also, in a compressed, news-reel montage fashion, of all the things that have happened since the first film, including what must be the shortest courtship and quickest pregnancy in history leading to Sam’s birth and Kevin’s widower status; Kevin’s takeover of video game corporation Encom, and how the board plans to handle his disappearance.

Jump forward 20 or so years to now as Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), pays his annual visit to the Encom tower, breaks in, hacks the company’s servers, uploads the new version of Encom’s operating system to the Internet making it available for free just before the company’s stock is to premiere on the Nikkei Index, and base jumps off the tower.  After his release from jail, Sam gets a visit from Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), Tron’s original programmer and the only person currently on the Encom board to raise objections to the company’s direction.  Why, Bradley wants to know, if Sam cares so much about information being free doesn’t he take an active role in the company as its largest stockholder?  He’s not ready he tells Alan, and are they really going to do the surrogate father thing again?

Yes, hacking, base jumping, and living in a storage container with a view of the multi-billion dollar company in which he holds a controlling share but can’t be bothered to actually run is Disney’s ham-handed way of telling us that Sam Flynn is an anti-hero.

A page Alan received from Flynn’s Arcade from a phone number that has been disconnected for 20 years leads Sam to his father’s private office where he’s sucked into the digital world of “the grid” after reawakening his father’s still running computer system.

In revealing that he isn’t a program but a user, and a user named Flynn, Sam learns that things are not all as his dad described in the digital world.  Far from the utopia he envisioned, the grid is a world of savage games and neo-fascist order which Clu keeps a hold of with help from his enforcer Rinzler. The conflict between Clu and “the creator,” Kevin Flynn, becomes quickly apparent as Sam is rescued from the game grid, his life saved by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), his father’s protege.

Kevin Flynn, meanwhile, has withdrawn to the badlands beyond the grid in an effort to frustrate Clu and keep him locked inside the digital world.   In his withdrawal from the world he’s created, Flynn has embraced several concepts key to Eastern religions chief among them the idea that sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing, an idea that escapes Sam.

It is in this clash of concepts, action vs. inaction (doing vs. not-doing), as well as in the exploration the nature of identity, the value and meaning of life, the definition of perfection and whether or not we should strive for it, and how strength can be expressed that ‘Legacy’ gets bogged down in its themes as the writers try to jam too many concepts into the tech/action film wrapper that they’ve chosen slowing down the action just enough to be noticeable and open that exploration up for derision.  This is very bold type handling of what could have been an interesting discussion is the second of the films two biggest failings.

It’s biggest failing is a combination of authorial hubris and poor casting.  When making a sequel, particularly for a cult film like ‘Tron,’ it is vital that the writers of the succeeding film pay attention to theoriginal text — the original film.  Even though Kevin Flynn was a carefree, unattached bachelor in the 1982 world of the first ‘Tron’ movie, I could almost forgive compressing the time line presented by the first film to allow for Sam Flynn’s existence (Sam would have to have been born in 1982 to be 7 in 1989 when the film opens which is a pretty quick courtship, marriage, and pregnancy).

What I can’t forgive is the casting mistake that presents a 13 year-old actor as a 7 year-old character.  The cognitive dissonance created in the first 10 minutes of the film was enough to make it difficult to immerse myself in the story which is really a shame considering that the ‘Tron’ films are all about immersion in another world.

Too, it’s a bit disappointing that the film’s producers chose to take a jab at Microsoft by presenting Encom as a greedy company (Alan Bradley questions the release of the new operating system by asking “With what we charge schools and students, how is the new software any different?” to which Encom’s CEO replies “We put a 12 on the box.”) committed to closed source, proprietary systems without actually fully exploring the question of whether not information, and access, should be free, a debate that is raging all over the world even as this film is released.  It’s also a touch disappointing how they handled the idea of a Dillinger-related antagonist (Cillian Murphy in an uncredited role as Edward Dillinger, presumably the son of disgraced former Encom CEO Ed Dillinger (David Warner from ‘Tron’)).

Is ‘Tron: Legacy’ worth seeing?  For the visuals alone I’d say yes but don’t expect to be fully satisfied.

A note on IMAX and 3D

I chose to see this film in IMAX 3D having never seen a non-documentary release in IMAX before with 3D being the rider to that.  In IMAX this film’s presentation is super impressive.  The visuals are sharp and stunning as is the sound design.  The use of 3D is moderately well executed but over all it’s not necessary to see it in 3D.  Save a little bit of cash and see it in regular, 2D projection unless you’re real computer or film geek.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

‘Captain America: The First Avenger‘ (2011) • IMDb link

This one’s a bit contentious — Joe Johnston, who directed The Rocketeer way, way back in 1991 should have been a good choice to direct a period piece about Marvel’s Captain America set during WWII. But then, Johnston turned in the pointless and unnecessary Wolfman remake this past year, and then cast Chris Evans (Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm) as Steve Rogers, rather than  Mark Valley, (‘Human Target’) an actor born for the role.

Understandably, Marvel and Disney are reaching for a younger actor for the role, but I really dobt that those 18-49 women should be the marketing department’s target. Rather, the target audience ought to be 4 generations of American men aged 7 to 70 that Marvel ought to be aiming for. That, and the fact that 25 year-old Evans will have to go up against 46 year old Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth and Samuel Jackson in ‘The Avengers‘ (2012) and make it somehow appear that they are peers.

‘Excalibur‘ (2012) • IMDb links 1, 2

Here’s one that I could not have anticipated, short of calling it sacrilige — an anticipated remake of John Boorman’s 1981 ‘Excalibur.’ I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it here, but it turns out that therre may be TWO competing projects, BOTH set up at Warner Bros., one helmed by Bryan Singer (X-Men’) and the other from Guy Ritchie (‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’) written by comic book author Warren Ellis (‘Red’). One is said to center upon Guinnivere and Lancelot, the other a straight remake of the Boorman film.

I’m curious to see Ellis’ take on the legend, yet I can’t besmirch Singer. Release dates for the competing films have yet to be released. IF Warners does it right, they’ll separate the releases. I the meantime, who would have guessed that Arthur would be the new Superman?

‘The Ring 3D‘ (2012) • IMDb link

3D is a current fad, but horror lost something special when director Gore Verbinski abandoned the Ring franchise to make Pirates of the Carribbean for Disney. DreamWorks may have only had good intentions when they invited the original Japanese director, Hideo Nakata, to direct Ring 2, but the producers dropped the ball, by giving him a weak script. (FWIW, I’ve heard that Scott Frank’s uncredited contribution to ‘The Ring’ is what made it work and not the solo credit that the MPAA gave to Ehren Kruger.)

The franchise had legs, but rather than keep the memory of the first movie fresh in people’s heads by releasing a straight-to-video third film, they let it die. Starship Troopers got 3 sequels, The Grudge (2004) got 2 sequels and Jeepers Creepers (2001) got 2 sequels all within spans of 1-6 years for the immediate sequel and third films. It’s madness that DreamWorks and Paramount sat on this franchise for so long, especially given that the fans — both Americans and foreign J-Horror adherents were waiting — no, begging for the opportunity to be exploited.

In Asia, Ringu spun off into both film and television franchises in Japan and SE Asia. It is not as though there is a shortage of story ideas for an American franchise to poach or improve upon, it’s just that producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald stopped making product and abandoned the franchise.

We can’t expect to see another Ring film until 2012, muck less another featuring Naomi Watts or David Dorfman, so this one’s entirely up in the air.. The Ring was made in 2002 — that’s a decade ago, so it’s only possible to presumed that DreamWorks SKG has walked away from tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, especially if the inferior Grudge and Final Destination frnachises were able to make any money.

‘Runaways‘ (2012) • IMDb link

Runaways is a Whedonesuque take on superheroes that even Joss Whedon failed at. Runaways is the fruit of scribe extraordinaire Brian K. Vaughan, who has conquered comics (Marvel and DC) , television (‘Lost’) and film (‘Runaways’, ‘Y: The Last Man’ and ‘Ex-Machina’),  during the 13 years that he’s been working professionally.

Runaways, first published in 2003,is part of  the 3rd Generation of comics creators that began with Alan Moore publishing Watchmen back in 1987. The premise here is that there super-villains with children who are unaware that their parents are super-villains. But then one day the veil drops and the kids of time-traveling villains, evil robots, mad scientists and mafiosi determine that they want to get away from their mobbed-up parents and do the right thing. They are all also teenagers.

The good here is that BKV has written the screenplay and is likely to be credited as a producer on this film because he served as co-producer on “Lost.” Word has it that Peter Sollett (‘Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist’) has been tapped to direct for Marvel Studios, now a subsidiary of Disney. Marvel’s control over the project should see that the project doesn’t turn into another camped-out version of the original idea (cf. ‘Wanted’, ‘Red’, The Fantastic Four’, etc.)

‘I Am Legend 2′ (2011) • IMDb link

Fact of the matter is that this could be good in ways that the former film didn’t deliver. Will Smith was never appropriate for this role and they got the book almost entirely wrong by turning it into a Will Smith action vehicle.

The implication in the novel is that our Neville has passed through the looking-glass and become the monster and the vampire/zombies that rove the world are the status quo, now afraid of him. A prequel could do some interesting things in the realm of Charleton Heston’s Omega Man flashback sequences, which are very Andromeda Strain-like. A ‘prequel’ of Legend could, possibly redeem both Legend and the 2008 remake of Andromeda Strain, given that it would be the same type of bio-apocalyptic scenario. The writers of this thing just have to be able to sell Smith as a scientist, as Neville was before he became a rugged, gun-toting survivalist.

1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′
4. ‘A Scanner Darkly’
5. ‘Avatar’
6. ‘Donnie Darko’
7. ‘Star Trek’
8. ‘Minority Report’
9. ‘Cloverfield’
10. ‘Serenity’

CoM, check; Moon, looked good, but it didn’t keep me awake; District 9, not — why South Africa? — and on and on. I am just incapable of becoming excited by most of these titles. Minority Report was interesting because of it’s Philip K. Dick cachet (and the fact that it was made during Bush II) , but very few of those movies had the **umph** of the movies I grew up on. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I feel as though I’ve lived a charmed life, given that the following came out during the period that sanned 1979-1989:

‘Alien’ (1979)
‘Altered States’ (1980) ‘The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
‘The Thing’ (1982)
‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983)
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984)
‘Dune’ (1980) ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) ‘Brazil’ (1985)
‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
‘Aliens’ (1986)
‘The Fly’ (1986)
‘Robocop’ (1987)
‘Near Dark (1987)
‘They Live’ (1988)

And I’m still unable to think of a good sf movie for 1989.

Since some of the best sci-fi of the passing decade has occurred on the small screen, I couldn’t resist listing a few television shows, if only because their effect on our pop-culture was indelible. In no particular order:

‘The Man from Earth’ (2007)
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
“Firefly”
“Battlestar Galactica”
‘Night Watch’ (2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_%282004_film%29
‘Day Watch’ (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_%28film%29
‘Iron Man’ (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28film%29
‘X-Men 2′ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_2_%28movie%29
“Farscape” (1999-2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Many of these moives and shows, I’ve already written about on this site.
Now, none of these entertainments as groundbreaking as any of those eighties movies, but I just needed a place to start this thing.

During the week, I’ll make an attempt to justify my choices, but in the meantime, I’ll ask readers in the audience to recommend their own science-fiction favorites or offer their own recommendations from a faded

The problem with both previous Predator flicks were that there was very little high-concept. In both preceding entries (Predator and Predator 2), the Predators and the humans were on Earth.

In the first film, the Predators interrupted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hunt for something or other, and in the sequel, they appeared in a very hot L.A. summer, getting in the way of a police investigation of some sort. In each, it is strictly humans vs. Predators.

In this new Robert Rodriguez film, things have gone 3 paces further, as the protagonists have been kidnapped to an off-world hunting preserve and there is no ‘team’ of humans working against the Predators. Rather, the 7 humans *aren’t* working together. After a short spell they recognize that the 7 of them each represent the worst kind of murderous criminal on Earth and that they have each been selected as quarry for some yet-to-be-determined agent on this new, Earth-like planet.

Rodriguez wrote an original script for Predators back in 1994, long before the AvP franchise was even conceived. To Rodriguez’s credit,Predators (1995) was conceived as a direct sequel to Predator 2.

Most interestingly, this really isn’t a Predator movie until well into the 4th reel, when the Predators finally appear. Until then, the film simply plays as a particularly good episode of The Twilight Zone, where the  hunters  of The Most Dangerous Game size each other up, before trying to do one another in. Rodriguez does a nice job here by prepending a human story to all of the glitchy, gooey and messy effects, remembering that the story should drive the effects and not vice-versa.

The most interesting aspect of this film is the ‘hands-off’ approach that Fox studio chief Tom Rothman has taken with this franchise, after his direct involvement with the ‘AvP‘ franchise. Here, Rothman has handed Rodriguez the entire Predator franchise to shoot, not in some Hollywood backlot, but on Rodriguez’s own Troublemaker Studios, out in Austin, TX. The most interesting thing is that the film works as a late addition to entire concept of Auteur filmmaking.

And a great big hats off to Adrien Brody for playing against type and to Topher Grace for making another, great, unaticipated career move.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Terry Gilliam attempted to bring ‘Watchmen’ to life twice, once in 1989 and a decade later, in 1999. He gave up because he felt that the story couldn’t be adequately covered in 2 hours’ time and that the material might be better dealt with as a miniseries, Though there is no Gilliam ‘Watchmen’, I credit ‘Watchmen’ and it’s alternate-apocalyptic 1985 for the rich visual landscape of thr film that Gilliam went on to produce in the mid-’90′s, ’12 Monkeys’ (1995).

Moore’s ambivalent heroes were a sea-change for comic book industry back in 1985, but Zack Snyder’s 2009 film stops far, far short of of Moore’s moral revisionism and even further from the Watchmen send-up that was Brad Bird’s ‘The Incredibles‘ (2004).

Anyone attempting to translate Moore’s 12-issue, 264 page graphic novel — a would-be 4-1/2 hours in screenplay-time — into filmed entertainment had a daunting enterprise ahead of them.

Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’ fails as an adaptation because the writers failed to adequately adapt the prosaic storyline to suit the 2-hour commercial format. The David Hayter/Alex Tse screenplay, hews too close to the dramatic beats of the original novel. At full length, those beats have their place because they furnish Moore’s 8 protagonists with engaging backstories, however, even at 166 minutes, the 264 page version of the thing fails to be fully satisfied.My other problem with the movie — besides the length — was the writers’ decision to comp so closely to the comic books’ dialogue and Snyder’s tolerance for some very average performances. I often felt as though the actors were reading their lines off of a teleprompter rather than inhabiting their characters. That and 2009 is not 1986 — people like Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca have neither standing or relevance, 23 years later after Chrysler has been bought, sold and is in the ditch once again. I’m certain that 90% of the cherished 16-24 viewing audience drew a complete blank the movie’s reference to Iacoccoca.

As a fanboy, I generally like to see my favorite stories faithfully reproduced for the screen. However, as an audience member, I saw too many rich characters crowding the screen, only to see their potential wasted. Each and every one of Moore’s Minutemen team were not only superheroes, but also tragic figures, trapped in their own peculiar hells. Silk Spctre (Sally Jupiter) is a 2nd-generation hero, having inherited her title from her mother, Sally Juspeczyk. Similarly, Nite Owl aka Daniel Dreiberg wears the costume of a legendary Silver Age hero. But the most formidable dysfunctions are to be found in the older heroes — Dr. Manhattan, the original Silk Spectre, Ozymandias and the Comedian because their idealism and nostallgia poison their daily lives.

Like Oliver North, The Comedian sees himself as a formidable patriot, despite the fact that his marching orders came from questionable quarters. When the one super-powered being, Jon Osterman, transmigrates into Doctor Manhattan, he leaves his humanity behind.

From my writerly perspective, Watchmen ought to have been Rohrshach’s picture — as with ‘Taxi Driver’, we ought to have had a good long taste of Rohrshach’s daily, hard-luck P.O.V., down to stealing Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl’s beans. The rising action of the Comedian’s death should have allowed Rohrshach to recount his troubled relationship with the man, but deciding to investigate the matter nonetheless.

There was no reason for this movie to run almost 3 hours. If you’ve got 246 pages of comic book script to turn into a movie and only 120 minutes to tell the story, then you’re going to have to cut some pages. Sometimes this happened, but we lost lots of important character development along the way. This is especially tragic because Watchmen is a character-driven piece. Like ‘Rosebud’ in ‘Citizen Kane’ we had an opportunity to see Jon Osterman’s childhood obsession with watches, but that didn’t play out in this film, even though it showed up on ‘Heroes’ (and then, was wasted).

I’m sure that the Snyder’s choices will justify themselves upon the 2nd and 3rd viewing, but the name of the game in moving works of literature into film is adaptation. Though I’m a huge fan of Carla Gugino, they ought to have diminished her role more and given Malin Akerman more space to explore being a 2nd-generation hero and Dr. Manhattan’s forgotten love interest, precisely because the Osterman/Janey Slater subplot doesn’t pay off as well as it does in the book.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The misguided mash-up that resulted in Hellraiser — in Space… by Executive producers Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt have now given us Alien-meets-Serenity-meets-The Descent-meets-Defying Gravity-meets-2001:A Space Odyssey-meets-The Abyss-meets-Cube-meets-Sunshine, allowing the worst aspects of each film a moment for a pirouette of inexplicability.  3 of those 7 movies had serious story problems.

Like the 4 different posters in the movie’s advertising campaign, the PR can’t seem to determine whether the movie is science-fiction, horror or something else completely. While that combination might sound somehow enervating, the fact is that where those producers missed with their horror-fied remake of Andrej Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’ is exactly where this duo have missed with ‘Pandorum’.Pandorum starts out well enough, with an intriguing premise — two astronauts on a long-distance, deep space exploration awake suddenly, after an unknown duration in hypersleep, the side-effect being that they have no memories of how they got where they were or what their mission is supposed to be. The problem is, that seems to be the motivation that the entire production team was using when they put this movie together.

There are no ideas in this movie, unless you’re the kind of science-fiction fan who delights in trainspotting the plagiarized source material. The movie is neither artful nor postmodern in it’s presentation. Like Event Horizon before it, Pandorum is just reheated leftovers, a serving of refried beans, some of them more than 20 years old.

The set design is pretty good, the fight choreography is difficult to follow and Dennis Quaid and Norman Reedus (Blade II, Mimic) are wasted here. Save your money and share a meal with someone you enjoy spending time with. Have a conversation.

I could go on at length, but there are only so many hours in a day and I have other business to attend to.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars

Imagine a couple million dollars of filmmaking equipment, and empty studio and several tens of state-of-the-art technicians waiting on some Seattle lawyers, and you get the idea. though the film is a little more substantive than  that.

As someone who’s hasn’t played many video games in the past 20 years and been disappointed by just about every game-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen. ‘District 9′ exceeds all of the expectations I never had for ‘Halo’.

Plot-wise, ‘District’ is sort of novel because it starts with an unlikely premise — technologically advanced extraterrestrials end up marooned here on Earth, living in dire, 3rd world conditions. Strangely enough, these aliens don’t exert their prowess and take-over the planet. Somehow, they end up as an underclass here on Earth, whiling away their time in an aimless barrio in Johannesburg, as poor as any of the former bantustans living off of cat food

Why Joburg? To quote the characters on ABC’s current space-opera, Defying Gravity, “H2IK” — hell if I know. Any other storyteller would use the Joburg location to make a point — about South Africa’s apartheid history, it’s role as a former British colony or Nelson Mandela’s heroism. Unfortunately, that’s just where ‘District 9′ seems to fail. You shouldn’t pull an ornate prop or set-piece out of storage unless it’s going to serve your play in a constructive manner. Here, Johannesburg is just a city, like any other.

With all of the potential that D9‘s dystopia had to offer, it really doesn’t go anywhere. Had D9 been set in Asia somepalce, the film might have played as an metaphor for the money that the West pours into Asia year after year, only to see human rights violations  and hungry children persist.

My understanding is that director Blokamp hails from Joburg and had done a 6-minute science-fiction film, ‘Alive in Joburg‘ (film) back in 2005. ‘District 9′ is an expansion of the AiJ premise.Though the visuals are fairly impressive, I didn’t get the impression that D9 was ever intended to be a game-changer the way that ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Star Wars’ were. 30 years ago.

Shot for only $30M, the film is a marvel of low-budget, high-end effects, but it’s still too expensive for the SyFy channel. I only wish they’d given the script another 2 weeks, to drive home an enduring story.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars